Othering Online

A Comparative Corpus Analysis of Right-Wing Extremist and Moderate Discourse on X

Resumé

This article examines and compares the language use of right-wing extremists and politically moderate users on the social media platform X with a focus on othering – the practice of creating rigid distinctions between an in-group and an out-group. The data analyzed consists of a corpus of 6,000 posts from X, evenly split between extremists and moderates. The study combines keyword and phrase analyses with qualitative analysis to examine how in- and out-groups are constructed in the data. The results show that extremist discourse differs from that of the politically moderate users in its use of language to construct in-group and out-group distinctions. The extremist users frequently employ ethnic and racial categories, such as “Jews,” “white,” and “black,” and combine these with predicative constructions (e.g., statements of the form “X are…”) and pronoun-based distinctions to assign negative and essentialized attributes to out-groups. These linguistic patterns contribute to the construction of hierarchical and exclusionary social groups, thereby reinforcing the process of othering. The article contributes empirically and methodologically by documenting patterns of othering in extremist discourse and by demonstrating how comparative corpus linguistics can be used to examine the shared narratives of an online environment.