Congruity of the freedom convoy and right-wing extremism through social identity theory
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Right-Wing Extremism (RWE) is continually growing its influence in Canada and around the world. RWE’s expansion can be attributed to the internet and its ability to spread extremist messages and ideologies in a form of misinformation and conspiracies. Consequently, individuals who are experiencing negative emotions and various grievances become susceptible to extremist beliefs and behaviour. Unfortunately, COVID-19 became an optimal event when internet usage, misinformation, and negative emotions became rampant in Canada. Canada’s federal government implemented restrictions to mitigate the spread of the virus, and as a result, the “Freedom Convoy” (FC) protest was organised to oppose these public health restrictions. Within days of its establishment, the FC movement quickly became a coalition of dissent against the federal government itself. Between January 22 and February 23, 2022, when the FC occupied downtown Ottawa, far-right groups and voices became notable among the protesters as various right-wing groups joined the FC in support of the protest. This thesis investigates the relationship and similarities between RWE and the FC. Its aim is to contribute to the academic discourse regarding RWE in hopes to identifying possible countermeasures that can be used to dissuade RWE violence. Furthermore, this thesis attempts to explain the group behaviours of the FC and RWE through social identity theory by explaining how the formation of groups with shared identities can create hostile and hateful actions towards other groups. Central to this thesis is the examination of anti-governmental and grievance attitudes, the power of misinformation and conspiracies, the idea of settler-colonialism and freedom, along with an analysis of the FC organisers’ links to far-right groups.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it