By means of a longitudinal systematic content analysis across six mainstream US news and six US far-right media outlets, we illustrate in this paper how the Swedish COVID-19 approach was refracted through ideologically diverse media outlets in the US. In doing so, we show how the same events can be interpreted through quite different ideological lenses and misconstrued for political purposes. We show how Sweden was championed as a beacon of limited state interference to criticise the US left and government's pandemic approach; an interesting reversal of how Sweden is usually seen by the US (far) right. We discuss the implications of these findings.

This article addresses the lack of critical empirical research into the power relations of those involved as hybrid media events unfold. Specifically, I address a gap in the research on how political scandals are (co-)constructed by different contributors in the hybrid media environment. By recreating the sequence of events over the course of eleven days, I map and analyse the hybrid media scandal that triggered a Swedish Liberal Party leader’s sudden resignation following statements made in a party YouTube video. The analysis adds insights into temporal complexities of contemporary scandal in hybrid media and displays the power of opinion leaders and the continued significance of legacy media in ensuring tangible political consequences for scandal narratives. The analysis further illustrates the importance of going beyond news end-products when attempting to gain a comprehensive understanding of how and why scandals unfold and highlights the relevance of social, cultural, and political contexts to grasp hybrid media scandals.

This article analyses the 'free speech' online forum Flashback, which adheres to a strict non-interference policy when it comes to user-generated content, but beyond this also forbids users from deleting their own content or accounts. Through a qualitative content analysis, this article sought to understand the relationship between the platform and its users with respect to this unconventional approach to moderation and content removal. This article discusses both the position(s) taken by Flashback as it pertains to its policy of minimal moderation, and the expectations as expressed by users navigating Flashbacks rules and their practical implementations. The article shows a discrepancy between how Flashback (incoherently) justifies minimal moderation and how users had imagined the platform operating. The article also discusses how Flashback maintains these policies through its community's active encouragement via supportive posting and silencing of non-conformers, and the consequences that Flashback's inaction has in terms of residual hate.

Sweden has increasingly come into international far right focus, and digital media sites in the United States have proven especially active in spreading mis- and disinformative narratives about the country. Using social network analysis and descriptive statistics, we trace 776 links over a 27 year-period to understand how U.S. far-right media sites construct the idea of Sweden as ‘the rape capital’ of the world. The article makes several contributions as it pertains both to the technological and ideological functions of citing for digital far-right media. We highlight the (lack of) timeliness of sourcing, the role of mainstream sources for repurposing and amplification, and practices of exaggeration and pseudo-legitimisation. Against the backdrop of our findings, we suggest the need for approaching digital far-right media information practices as more complex and subtle than they have previously been conceived, and highlight the necessity to problematise misinformation as a label for misrepresentation in digital far-right media.

In several countries, research shows that mainstream news media have increasingly become a target of political attacks, and a recurring accusation is that the news media are biased politically. Since social media play an important role in circulating accusations of media bias, in this paper we analyze 167,527 Swedish tweets about media bias over a ten-year period using the mixed-methods CADS approach, which incorporates computational processes with discourse analysis. Specifically, we explore the prevalence of bias accusations over time and which news outlets constitute the main targets; from what political perspectives these bias accusations have originated over time; and how discourses accusing the news media of political bias are constructed. Among other things, the results show that accusations of left-wing bias are much more common than accusations of right-wing bias. A key reason is that actors on the politicalright engage much more frequently in accusations of media bias than their center-left counterparts, and that discourses of media bias are heavily dominated by right-wing populist tropes in which mainstream media are part of the "corrupt", lying elite who spread "politically correct" disinformation.

The 2022 Swedish election saw a radical-right populist party-the Sweden Democrats-gain direct government influence in the country for the first time. This contrasted with the international image of Sweden as a progressive county yet resonated with the country's growing ideological use by foreign far-right actors. This article analyzes the framing of Sweden's image in traditional and far-right online media from the United States, Germany, India, and China during this election. It explores to what extent and when Sweden gained online media attention and how the election was framed across these countries and media types.

This paper analyses how immigrants are understood by Swedish alternative media and the role that Islamophobia plays, if at all, in these representations. What is remarkable is that although all articles were sampled explicitly to discuss Ukraine, the analysis showed that Muslim immigrants figured with unexpected frequency throughout. The value of these two immigrant groups were antagonistically contrasted through arguments of alleged differences in culture and geographical origin, perceived legitimacy as asylum seekers, and in terms gratitude and supposed level of threat to Swedish society. With this, the unity that is formed around Islamophobia trumps any nationalist views of the Swedish nation state as particularly superior or white and the social and economic consequences which are usually believed to be at risk due to immigration. By extension, the war in Ukraine is articulated as a matter of whiteness and works to exploit war for strengthening the transnational far right.

In this paper, we explore how highly visible users in the context of #BlackLivesMatter on TikTok shape the narrative around Black victims of police brutality, the understanding of these narratives by others, and the potential consequences of these portrayals for the movement at large. To examine these dimensions, we analysed the 100 most circulated TikTok videos and associated comments depicting victims of police brutality using the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag through multimodal critical discourse analysis. We identified how users attempted to increase visibility of their content, and how this was supported or criticised by commenters depending on the perceived motives of these efforts. Furthermore, we showcased how influencers raised awareness of the movement with little personal effort or risk, sometimes appearing to leverage the movement for self-exposure. Our analysis showed that many of the most liked videos were made by white content creators who, in their videos, seemed to be addressing an imagined white audience. While these efforts portrayed the movement favourably, the content creators remain outsiders who have not themselves been in harm's way of police brutality. While there were exceptions that promoted the perspectives of marginalised communities, and while the white narratives were consistently supportive of the movement, they also work to displace focus on racial (in)justice away from those directly affected by it, that is, away from Black people's own experiences of police brutality. We discuss these findings in relation to questions about digital representations of Black victimhood, digital visibility and practices of whiteness, on TikTok and beyond.

This paper analyses how Sweden has come to be imagined and represented on the websites of US far right organisations since the start of the so-called 'migration crisis' of 2015. It focused specifically on when Sweden is discussed by the US far right and in relation to what events, and what values and associations are attributed to Sweden. The analysis showed that news events were not reported on by US far-right organisations as they took place in Sweden but instead appropriated and accentuated when they could be used to make certain points directed at the audiences of these organisations. Furthermore, the findings showed that the texts tended to focus on scaremongering about Muslim immigrants and Islam in ways that highly resembled those of the European far right. The paper discusses how such framing helps the international far right form a coherent narrative and all-applicable template for the problems of Muslims facing the Western world. Finally, the analysis showed how Sweden is positioned in a complex juxtaposition: as something both good and bad; superior while also inferior; a great nationalist role model but also a warning example, and how Swedish whiteness plays a central role in these depictions.

This paper uses the Swedish, once neo-Nazi expression culture enricher (Swedish: kulturberikare) as a case study to explore how covert and coded far-right discourse is mainstreamed, over time and across websites. A sample of 2,336 uses of the expression between 1999 and 2020 were analysed using critical discourse analysis. The findings illustrate how the expression works like a ‘dog whistle’ by enabling users to discretely self-identify with an imagined in-group of discontent white ‘Swedes’, while simultaneously showing opposition to the priorities of a generalised ‘establishment’. It shows how the expression is circulated in settings ranging from mainstream to far-right, and particularly, it highlights the potential role of semi-radical settings to act as gateways between mainstream and far-right ideas. Finally, the analysis shows evolving, ever more covertly hateful uses of the expression over time, illustrating the adaptability of far-right language online more generally, as a means to evade unwanted exposure by the far-right.

In recent years, several high-profile political protests and social movements have formed on and through social media. Whereas most large-scale datasets address singular social media movements political topical discussions, or events, Tweets Across the Political Spectrum 2016–2020 (TAPS) instead provides access to social media data on a broad range of digital political issues and social movements, spanning over several years. The TAPS dataset incorporates data based on a range of high-profile and widely used hashtags, ranging from those on the far left of the political spectrum to those on the far right. Concretely, we introduce a dataset consisting of 207 million tweets, posted between 2016-01-01 and 2020-12-31, using any of the 24 hashtags #alllivesmatter, #antifa, #black- livesmatter, #blackouttuesday, #blm, #bluelivesmatter, #deepstate, #extinctionrebellion, #fridaysforfuture, #greennewdeal, #maga, #marchforourlives, #metoo, #nobannowall, #nodapl, #pizzagate, #qanon, #qarmy, #takeaknee, #unitetheright, #whitegenocide, #whitelivesmatter, #womensmarch, and #wwg1wga. TAPS is relevant for research into political debates, social movements, polarisation and more, within a range of academic fields, including for instance computational social science, sociology, political science, data science, and communication studies. The data span over an extended period during which these hashtags were frequently used, and the dataset is comprehensive enough to identify large-scale patterns and to provide possibili- ties for comparisons over time, within or across political issues. To our knowledge this is the only large-scale dataset which incorporates, to this degree, tweets from different social movements, political discussions, and protests on different ends of the political spectrum.

The study presented in this article explores the processes through which influence takes shape in eclectic online forums with few vanity metrics. Using a dataset of 7.5 million posts in the large Swedish online discussion forum Flashback, it explores who becomes influential, their strategies for appealing to the community, and others’ support of them. While it has been known that Flashback hosts far-right users and content, the current study shows that these sentiments are not fringe or obscure, but instead seemingly widely supported and influential in the forum. It illustrates that the influential users—those who are supported and acknowledged by others as important—exclusively and continuously expressed far-right ideas and displayed an embeddedness within the far-right, as well as in the forum’s culture. The study finds that despite few visible markers, many users learned to recognize influential users and their far-right content as worthy of support. In the absence of built-in functions, some users engaged in manual “liking” and “sharing” of influential users’ content via their replies, acknowledging it as a way to legitimize them. At the same time, the analysis showcased how a lack of vanity metrics countered potential echo chamber effects in the forum as disliked users—advocating progressive gender and immigration ideas—were unintentionally amplified by those who attempted to silence them. The article also discusses the role of Flashback as a platform in the proliferation of hate.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly becoming an important technology, affecting our everyday lives, and is predicted to do so even more extensively in the coming years. Still, the concept remains somewhat fuzzy. As IoT continues to grow in importance and scope, so does the need to understand how the concept is used and what it represents. This study analyzes over nine million tweets over an extended sample period, applying a mixed methods approach to investigate how IoT is understood on Twitter over time, and importantly, the human and non-human actors that were prolific in shaping the discourse. The findings reveal a changing focus within the IoT discourse over time — from a primary technological, engineering perspective to one which highlighted practical implementations and particularly ways of leveraging IoT solutions to cultivate service innovation and generate novel forms of value creation. The scholarly community is not keeping up with this change. Furthermore, the analysis shows that over time, bots become increasingly prominent in tweeting IoT-related content, at the expense of individual Twitter users. This finding puts into new light the question of who shapes emerging technological concepts and the accountability and agency of bots.

Using a combination of descriptive statistics, sentiment analysis and close readings of a collection of 74,336 Swedish tweets, this article explores the platform usage patterns of users who are influential in a Swedish far-right discourse on Twitter and how these users help to (re)produce far-right discourse. Specifically, it focuses on their use of platform functions and on language use. The analysis shows that influential users have a narrow focus in terms of the content they post and how they profile themselves. They are highly active, have more followers and produce more original content than other users. Surprisingly, while previous research has found that emotionally charged tweets are retweeted more and that highly popular and influential Twitter users tend to express more emotion while tweeting, influential users in this dataset often posted far-right content concealed as neutral, factual statements. This use of seemingly neutral language creates an inclusive far-right context, lets influential users evade responsibility for their content as well as facilitates more overtly hateful interpretations.

This article analyses the discursive representations of trans people in 15,901 mainstream Swedish newspaper articles between 2000 and 2017 using topic modelling and critical discourse analysis. Drawing from critical perspectives on gender it was found that the articles to various degree assisted in maintaining heteronormativity. The discursive strategies employed by the journalists included trivialisation of trans expressions as dress-up and incorporation of them within binary stereotypes. Trans people were also excluded and deemed as deviant in some articles through insensitive gender descriptions and descriptions. Through the voices of experts, trans people were silenced and pathologized and while some representations of trans people were meant to empower, and offered a slightly less rigid view on gender, these articles too reinforced heteronormativity through continuous referral to binary gender.

Facebook has faced growing criticism regarding its handling of hateful user-generated content (UGC) with research revealing how the platform can foster both covert and overt racism. This research has tended to focus on racist content while relying on abstract references to the general logics of social media platforms. In this article we consider how Facebook shapes the production of racist discourse in more concrete ways by integrating a concern for the platform’s architectures and affordances within a broader analysis of the immigration-related discussions of a large Swedish Facebook group. We combine a quantitative topic modeling of a large data set of the group’s UGC with a qualitative critical discourse analysis (CDA) of a sample of that data set. Our findings show how Facebook enables and influences various discursive strategies of identification and persuasion—within which covert and overt racist discourses are embedded—through processes of cybertyping, role-playing, crowdsourcing and (counter-)reaction.

This study seeks to further the knowledge on IoT by analysing the meanings which have been attached to it in a social media setting. The study focuses on how IoT is constructed as a concept, on the users who contributed to this conceptual construction and the uses of some of the key platform functionalities. Large amounts of data from the social networking site Twitter were studied with a type of mixed methods approach, mainly drawing on Connected Concepts Analysis, which incorporates both quantitative and qualitative traditions. The analysis identified a small number of users as very influential and a change in use of hashtags, likes and retweets over time, both in terms of content and frequency. The discourse itself focused to a great extent on technology and business-related issues, mostly disregarding ethical issues. The study contributes with insight into IoT discourse in a previously unexplored setting and proposes a methodological flexibility for IS research which is lacking.