Is the Alt-Right Popular in Canada? Image Sharing, Popular Culture, and Social Media
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: In popular coverage and social media analysis, the alt-right has been described as a popular phenomenon. Following Stuart Hall’s understanding of popular culture, we question the status of the alt-right in Canada as both a political and methodological problem that requires critical attention to social media metrics and critical experimentation in developing new digital methods. Analysis: Our study developed a novel method to analyse image circulation across major social media platforms. We find that image sharing is marginal, yet the spread of images distinguishes political communities between Twitter hashtags, subreddits, and Facebook pages. We found a distinct alt-right community in our sample, active but isolated from other popular sites. Conclusion and Implications: While the findings suggest the limited significance of image sharing to conceptualize popularity in cross-platform analysis, our novel method offers a compelling alternative to corporate social media analytics and raises new questions about how popular politics, especially the popularity of the alt-right, may be studied in the future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".