A mob assaulted the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2020. Far from an isolated event, many actors paved the road that lead to the insurrection -- from media figures to politicians to mainstream social media platforms to smaller social media platforms geared toward the extreme right. In this paper, we focus on members of the U.S. Congress who contested and voted against the certification of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. We contrast their social media contrast their public posting activity on the alt-right social media platform Parler and the mainstream social media site Twitter.

We examined the social media presence of the 147 Congressional election objectors by studying their official Twitter accounts, deleted tweets from their official Twitter accounts, and compared that content with what they posted to their Parler in the lead-up to January 6. Using profile information from the Aliapoulios, et al. dataset (2021a, 2021b), we were able to find Parler accounts for 46 of the 147 objectors. Of those accounts, 34 did not have a post or comment history. What remained was a collection of 12 accounts where social media activity across platforms could be compared. We found significant differences in approaches to communication across tweets, deleted tweets, and Parler posts. These differences illustrate messaging strategies that were adaptive to the audience and affordances of the Parler platform.

In this paper we unpack the 2022 Brazilian Presidential campaign marked by multiple claims of electoral fraud and support for a coup d’état by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro. We identify the narrative frames underpinning the insurrectionist playbook by analyzing Bolsonaro’s statements during the presidential campaign. We subsequently test the penetration of this playbook on members of the Brazilian National Congress during the campaign trail and the transition of power to the opposition candidate, when pro-Bolsonaro protesters attempted to overthrow the Federal Government. Our analyses lend support to the hypothesis that the coup d’état was not successful due to the dwindling support beyond the hard-core Bolsonaro base. Our results also show that the insurrectionist playbook, largely centered on the blueprint of false claims of electoral fraud, can be monitored through the public statements of elected officials. We conclude with a discussion of our findings and recommendations for future research.

The “Alt-Right,” a white nationalist online coalition, has collapsed amidst a revolution in digital governance termed the “regulatory turn.” Nevertheless, the regulatory turn remains incomplete because white nationalists utilize graphical user interface (GUI) design to subvert public stewardship. Why have some former Alt-Right platforms collapsed while others have grown despite increased scrutiny? The field’s account is currently limited to social media networks and rooted in positivist methods, lending a static conception of white nationalist networks that is slow to recognize cultural shifts. This paper fills the gap by comparatively critiquing the interfacing affordances of Telegram, an instant messaging app that functions as an "ideological safe harbor" for U.S. white nationalists with content aggregation, blogging, and activist use-cases. I apply interface critique to index how the manipulation of graphical user interfaces allows white nationalists to frame their browsing as a technology of mastery over and against the regulatory turn. I argue that Telegram networks coopt the enclave public, exploiting an ideology of decentralization to mystify the leverage held by white nationalist developers over their users. This occlusion redirects white masculine anxieties against publicity to justify an intensified racist fanaticism and the exportation of violence against racial, religious, and gendered outsiders. White interfacing frames GUI design as a capitalist technology that weaponizes the racist and sexist logic of the “average user” to secure the reproduction of reactionary platforms. This project furthers Internet research by developing a theory of the interface as an ideological mirror of production.