About this Event
Speakers: Drs. Lucia Busso (Aston University) & Dana Roemling (University of Birmingham)
Abstract: There is growing consensus that fringe online spaces are increasingly shaping mainstream online discourse and contributing to a widening of the Overton window, i.e. the range of political and cultural ideas that society finds acceptable at any given time (Vo, 2019; Sengul, 2025; Skoczylis et al., 2026).
We contribute to this debate through a corpus-assisted analysis of two previously unexplored datasets, both from a white supremacist dating website. This platform explicitly caters to White users, excludes individuals of non-White ancestry in its terms of service, and includes fascism and national socialism among its political orientation options. The first dataset consists of the About Me and Looking For sections from more than 6,500 dating profiles (approximately 500,000 words), while the second comprises threads from a discussion forum available to the website’s users (approximately 700,000 words).
Specifically, we explore the tension between the private and the public sphere through a manual semantic annotation of 250 keywords per dataset (compared to a corpus of English of the web). Results suggest that fringe discourses are pushed into the mainstream media by framing politically charged topics (such as traditional marriage, dating “within the white race”, survivalism, and Odinism) as personal – and hence acceptable – preferences.
References:
Skoczylis, J., Babalola, J., & Oludele, V. (2026). Amplified hatreds: Far-right extremism and the algorithmic infrastructure of social media. In C. Ferguson (Ed.), Handbook of social media and violence. Routledge.
Sengul, K. (2025). “View profiles without pronouns”: The politics and discourse of ‘anti-woke’right-wing dating app, The Right Stuff. Discourse, Context & Media, 65, 100876.
Vo, L. T. (2019). How the internet created multiple publics. Geo. L. Tech. Rev., 4, 399.
Event venue & nearby stays
Aston University, Aston Street, Birmingham, United Kingdom
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