‘Let us teach our children’: Online racism and everyday far-right ideologies on TikTok
Özge Özdüzen, Nelli Ferenczi, Isabel Holmes · Visual Studies · 2023
This paper identifies perceptions of injustice, grievance, and alienation as online drivers of radicalisation by concentrating on contemporary visual radicalisation patterns.It focuses on far-right agents of radicalisation in the UK with a particular analysis of visual and ephemeral drivers of radicalisation on social media platforms.We analysed widespread TikTok hashtags which embody mainstream right-wing ideologies.Using these hashtags, we selected four popular videos (> 30k views) for visual thematic analysis of their compositional content and comment-sphere to explore everyday representations and discourses of farright ideologies.Our findings highlight mundane online expressions on TikTok that collectively reinforce notions of a shared idealised identity built on nostalgic reinterpretations of an imperial past, which contribute to the mainstreaming of far-right ideas and ideologies.Dr Ozge Ozduzen is lecturer in Digital Media and Society in the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK.She is a PI on the British Academy project entitled 'Mapping and visualising intersections of social inequalities, community mistrust, and vaccine hesitancy in online and physical spaces in the UK and US' and co-PI on the Horizon 2020 project D.Rad: Deradicalization in Europe and Beyond: Detect, Resolve, Reintegrate.Dr Nelli Ferenczi is a lecturer in Psychology and a member of the Centre for Culture and Evolution at