The Use of Military Narratives in White Supremacist Chatrooms on Telegram
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Authors
Weinberg, Dana B.
Cohen, Noah D.
Levy, Meyer.
Ni, Yunis.
Issue Date
2024
Type
Article
Language
en_US
Keywords
Alternative Title
Research Article
Abstract
This study investigates the connections between military and white supremacist narratives
in extremist channels on the social media platform Telegram. It explores military
narratives as both a source of and impetus to insider threat. Narratives about the
military, when combined with extremist narratives, can redirect antipathies toward
legitimate leadership and drive individuals to commit violence or betray institutions.
Moreover, the co-opting of military narratives to support extremism may serve to undermine
public trust in and support for the military itself, posing an additional threat
to national security.
Scraping data from 224 public Telegram channels between September 2016 and
October 2020 and selecting posts that contain military terminology, we explore
connections between white supremacist and military narratives through the use of
supervised machine learning techniques. We hand-code small portions of our corpus
(training set) for these narratives and then label the remaining data (test set) using a
machine learning classification process. The results enable analysis of the narrative
network underlying the corpus.
We find that white supremacist narratives are prevalent in posts with militaryterminology
and frequently appear alongside military narratives. The corpus is
dominated by what previous research has termed "extinction narratives," or
narratives which predict the destruction of one's cultural group. Such narratives
are capable motivators of violence. Military actors and themes often form the
backdrop for these narratives, which vilify Jews as evil infiltrators of American
institutions and cast whites as innocent victims of their machinations and of
government betrayal. Military narratives lend urgency and legitimacy to these
narratives that underscore white superiority and threats to the white race.
Description
Citation
Weinberg, D.B., Cohen, N. D., Levy, M., & Ni, Y. (2024). The Use of Military Narratives in White Supremacist Chatrooms on Telegram. Managing Insider Risk & Organizational Resilience (MIROR) Journal, 2(1), 87-107. West Point Press.
Publisher
West Point Press
License
Journal
Volume
Issue
PubMed ID
DOI
ISSN
2832-5427
2832-5419
2832-5419