Affective–discursive ecologies of the far right: Multimodal softening, mobilisation and algorithmic proximity on Instagram

Summary

This article theorises far-right Instagram as an affective-discursive ecology in which ideology, emotion, and platform logics are mutually constitutive. Drawing on a corpus of 2,603 Reels with far-right adjacent themes, Nangle and d’Haenens argue that contemporary far-right communication does not rely primarily on overt hostility but on positively valenced affect, humour, and memetic forms that soften extremist worldviews and render them shareable. Combined with Instagram’s recommender system, this multimodal softening produces an algorithmic proximity between mainstream lifestyle content and far-right adjacent material, enabling normalisation and mobilisation.

Key Contributions

• Introduces affective-discursive ecology as a conceptual frame for far-right communication on visual platforms.
• Bridges scholarship on mainstreaming, memetic/affective publics, and critical platform/algorithm studies.
• Delivers a large-scale multimodal empirical study of Reels — an under-examined format in extremism research.
• Demonstrates a methodological pairing of algorithmic ethnography with multimodal discourse analysis.

Methods

The authors combine algorithmic ethnography — tracing how Instagram’s recommendation system surfaces and connects far-right adjacent content — with multimodal discourse analysis attentive to audiovisual, textual, and affective layers. The empirical base is a dataset of 2,603 Reels coded for far-right adjacent themes.

Findings

• Far-right Reels foreground humour, irony, and positive affect rather than aggression, lowering the threshold for engagement.
• Memetic and multimodal genres serve as vehicles for mainstreaming, embedding ideology in familiar entertainment registers.
• Instagram’s algorithmic logics generate proximity between ordinary lifestyle content and far-right adjacent material, amplifying circulation and supporting mobilisation pathways.

Connections

This work pairs naturally with Rothut2026-wt on how everyday platform content channels radicalisation, and with Karo2026-dn and Bouchafra2026-ts insofar as they address ideological diffusion and platform-mediated extremism. Bailard2024-pj offers a complementary platform-effects perspective, though from a different methodological angle.