On the Margins of Socio-Political Extremes: An Analysis of Conservative Albertans’ Facebook Posts and Comments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigates Albertans' expressions of social, political, and economic discontent to describe to what extent these expressions reflect right-wing populist outlooks and the characteristics of recent right-wing populist movements.This question was investigated using a critical theoretical orientation and an ethnographic content analysis methodology to analyze content collected from two popular, Alberta-based, socio-politically conservative public Facebook pages: Alberta Proud and Alberta Stronger.Analysis revealed the central elements of populism with social decline being attributed to corrupt elites and associated 'others' and social revival being attributed to 'the people'.Overarching themes of discontent are consistent with the characteristics of recent right-wing populist movements including distrust in institutions, elected officials and experts, and perceived economic threat.Ultimately, I theorize that expressions of right-wing populism observed here reflect the political imaginaries of a settler colonial population that remains committed to economic liberalism and liberal individualism despite outwardly rejecting 'liberalism'.Gruzd, 2022) compared to other popular social media sites (e.g.Instagram and X/Twitter) while offering relatively unrestricted modes of exchange.Facebook does not limit the amount of text that can be used within individual posts or comments (unlike X/Twitter), enabling the expression of complex ideas and opinions and encouraging responses to posts and exchanges among commenters 1 while also providing a mix of textual and image-based exchanges.The pages chosen for this project are politically conservative in tone but are not openly affiliated with a specific political party or politician. 2 Posts on both pages are consistent with a meme-driven format, pairing posts with relatively minimal text with attention grabbing images that help to signal and frame various social, political, and economic topics.Upon commencing this study in the fall of 2023, the 'Alberta Proud' FB page had 225K followers and had been active since Jan. 16, 2016.It is one of multiple FB pages using the 'province/territory/region Proud' phrase that are popular on FB as well as other social networking sites and is cited as originating the trend of politically oriented 'Proud' pages (Gerson, 2020).Alberta Proud has an explicitly sociopolitical agenda and is registered with Elections Alberta as a third-party advertiser and is registered as a not-for-profit corporation.3 The mission of Alberta Proud is stated as the following on the group's official website: Alberta Proud is a group of citizens concerned about Alberta's future within Canada.Alberta has a distinct identity thanks to our western roots and entrepreneurial spirit.But 1 Replies to comments proved to be a particularly rich source of information for this project.Within comment 'replies', commenters often explained or defended their opinions to other commenters, which further strengthened the validity of the analysis by indicating that commenters were willing to engage in discussion. 2 Although these pages are not known to be explicitly affiliated with any political party, I discovered through research about this page within the multi-phase ECA process that the Alberta Proud page is likely a part of a larger network of Facebook pages that have received funding from conservative political advocacy groups as well as individuals affiliated with conservative political parties and politicians.This topic will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4 under the heading 'Alberta Proud: Emergent Relevance'. 3 See Appendix A: Alberta Proud Certificate of Incorporation 'He is a typical leech on society.He should be put on a union poster.' -Comment from AP 'What public sector parasite union do you work for?!' -A reply to a comment on AP that dissents from the post frame
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".