Internship Report| Researched and Written by Fox Oliver

Fox Oliver carried out research for INACH: ‘Getting Away With Hate: The Use of Hateful Narratives Eluding Regulation on X by Geert Wilders and Viktor Orbán’. His research employed a manual, qualitative content analysis of 172 relevant posts made by right-wing populist politicians Geert Wilders and Viktor Orbán on X during three month periods surrounding their respective elections.

The results show that Wilders and Orbán use a mix of frames, including those that highlight criminality, cultural incompatibility, political infiltration, and occasionally economic costs, to depict migrants, Muslims, and LGBTIQ+ people. By being vague and implicit, misrepresenting groups, targeting individuals, and criticizing ideologies instead of people, these politicians are able to create harmful narratives which elude hate speech regulation.

The affordances which allow for these posts to be spread are identified, and relations to and implications for X’s current hate speech policies are discussed. While regulation prevents these politicians’ use of explicit hate speech, this research shows it still plays a key role in shaping the form that harmful narratives take when they are disseminated online.

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