Online influence, offline violence: Linguistic responses to the 'Unite the Right' rally
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The media frequently describes the 2017 Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' rally as a turning point for the alt-right and white supremacist movements. Related research into social movements also suggests that the media attention and public discourse concerning the rally may have influenced the alt-right. Empirical evidence for these claims is largely lacking. The current study investigates potential effects of the rally by examining a dataset of 7,142 YouTube video transcripts from alt-right and progressive channels. We examine sentiment surrounding the ten most frequent keywords (single words and word pairs) in transcripts from each group, eight weeks before to eight weeks after the rally. In the majority of cases, no significant differences in sentiment were found within and between the alt-right and progressive groups, both pre- and post-Charlottesville. However, we did observe more negative sentiment trends surrounding 'Bernie Sanders' and 'black people' in the alt-right and progressive groups, respectively. We also observed more negative sentiment after the rally regarding 'Democratic Party' in the alt-right videos compared to the progressive videos. We suggest that the observed results potentially reflect minor changes in political sentiment before and after the rally, as well as differences in political sentiment between the alt-right and progressive groups in general.
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