Washington, D.C. — ThinkProgress has launched a new dashboard to monitor and track trends, topics, and conversations moving through the extreme right on Twitter. The dashboard will allow readers to examine what fringe, far-right communities are discussing in real time, and it will shine a light on how these ideas often permeate the mainstream political discussion.
“These are extremist communities that organize online to spread racist, sexist, xenophobic, and paranoid ideas throughout the internet,” Judd Legum, editor-in-chief of ThinkProgress, explained. “Increasingly, ideas that originate in these communities later appear on Fox News or are amplified by the president of the United States. This is a tool that will help anyone track how these ideas originate and spread.”
The dashboard gathers its data from about 2,000 Twitter accounts belonging to members of the so-called “alt-right” and related right-wing political movements.
These communities rely on secrecy and anonymity, but the ideas, memes, and attacks of the extreme right have become an increasingly important part of the political discourse in the Trump era.
From attacks on the Parkland students, to videos from anti-Muslim extremists in England, to the white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, these internet phenomena seem to appear spontaneously on Fox News or President Donald Trump’s Twitter account. In reality, they emerge from an extensive network and ecosystem that was previously sidelined from the American political debate.
The “Tracking the Extreme Right on Twitter” dashboard can be found online at extremeright.thinkprogress.org.
For more information or to speak with an expert, contact Jesse Lee at [email protected] or 202-741-6350.