Fear, Anger and Loathing in Scandinavia: How Emotions Mobilize the Far-Right Online

Emotional reactions to societal change have long been seen as important for the mobilization of the far-right. While some research has seen fear as the main driver for far-right and anti-islamic mobilization (Ekman 2015, Wodak 2015), recent contributions have argued that anger is the driving force of far-right support (Vasilopoulos et al. 2018). Anger has also been found to be crucial to both engagement in online debates and to the creation of online echo chambers (Wollebæk et al. 2019). This paper contributes to this research by going beyond survey data and directly studying the emotional content of the posts in prominent Scandinavian far-right Facebook groups. Sentiment analysis is used to identify the emotional content of one year worth of posts of multiple groups in each country. This is used to investigate the multitude of emotional reactions in the far-right mobilization, not only fear and anger (Lesser and Spissinger 2020). The emotional content of the posts is in turn used to investigate to what extent the different types of emotion lead to differences in mobilization and engagement online.