Mapping the Terrain: From Mechanisms to Meaning
The three papers gathered here triangulate a shared puzzle — how digital environments enable radical, far-right, and conspiratorial worldviews to gain traction — but they enter it from strikingly different altitudes. Rothut2026-wt offers the macro-view: a 25-year scoping review of online radicalization research that maps the field’s conceptual scaffolding (Lasswell’s communication elements crossed with macro/meso/micro levels) and tracks its empirical turn since 2018. Nangle2026-yo zooms into the meso-level texture of a single platform ecology, examining how affect and humour circulate on Instagram. Grusauskaite2026-po works at the micro-interactional level, reading how participants in “Great Reset” conspiracy discussions construct a collective “we” across six platforms. Together, they move the conversation from whether the internet radicalizes toward how normalization, identity, and affective belonging actually operate in situ.
The Internet as Catalyst, Not Cause
Rothut2026-wt sets the field’s current consensus position: the internet is best understood as a catalyst that accelerates radicalization through information, contact, and infrastructural affordances rather than a root cause, and the analytical separation of “online” and “offline” has become untenable. This reframing is consequential for how we read the other two papers. Neither Nangle2026-yo nor Grusauskaite2026-po treats platforms as deterministic radicalization machines; both instead examine how platform logics interlock with cultural, emotional, and discursive work performed by users. The review also flags a growing phenomenological diversification — misogynist, QAnon/conspiracy, and anti-system currents that do not map onto classical left-right axes — which is precisely the empirical terrain the other two papers occupy.
Softening, Humour, and the Aesthetics of Normalization
Nangle2026-yo sharpens one of the macro-level mechanisms catalogued by Rothut2026-wt — the mainstreaming of extremist ideas — into a concrete account of multimodal softening. Rather than overt hostility, far-right Instagram trades in positively valenced affect, memes, and humorous Reels that render extremist worldviews palatable and shareable. The notion of an “affective-discursive ecology” insists that ideology, emotion, and algorithmic curation are mutually constitutive: algorithmic proximity places far-right adjacent content beside ordinary lifestyle material, and the affective register does the normalizing work. This complements Rothut2026-wt’s observation that recipient-level effects depend on prior dispositions and repeated exposure rather than single shocks — softened, repeated, emotionally resonant content is exactly the kind of low-intensity drip the review’s recipient literature implies matters most.
Identity and Boundary Work as the Engine of Belonging
Grusauskaite2026-po pushes back against techno-centric explanations most forcefully, arguing that conspiracy cultures are sustained by relational identity work and affective solidarity rather than by echo chambers or algorithmic sorting per se. Participants in Great Reset debates reclaim “conspiracy theorist” as a badge of honour, fashion themselves as autonomous “critical thinkers,” and transmute personal economic hardships into collective “deep stories” arrayed against a “sheeple” mainstream. Strikingly, the discursive strategies are consistent across six platforms — a finding that puts pressure on platform-affordance-centric accounts and dovetails with Rothut2026-wt’s warning against neat online/offline partitions. The paper’s identification of a “diagonal” coalition uniting secular-libertarian and religious-Christian participants under shared anti-institutionalism also exemplifies the post-left/right phenomenology Rothut2026-wt flags as an emerging frontier.
Points of Convergence and Productive Tension
A clear throughline runs across the three: affect and emotion are not ornamental but constitutive. Nangle2026-yo’s positive-affect softening and Grusauskaite2026-po’s affective solidarity over shared grievance both illustrate what Rothut2026-wt groups under meso-level “emotional convergence” within radicalizing communities. Yet there is productive tension over where explanatory weight should sit. Nangle2026-yo foregrounds algorithmic proximity and platform logics; Grusauskaite2026-po argues that meaning-making travels across platforms largely unchanged; Rothut2026-wt holds that both matter but that robust causal evidence remains scarce. The three papers thus stake out the field’s current methodological frontier: moving from cataloguing mechanisms to specifying the cultural, affective, and identity-level processes through which platforms, content, and recipients co-produce radical and conspiratorial publics.
Gaps and Openings
Rothut2026-wt explicitly names what remains undone: longitudinal designs, causal inference, attention to understudied platforms (Gab, 4chan, BitChute, gaming), and integration across levels. Nangle2026-yo and Grusauskaite2026-po gesture toward the kinds of qualitative and multimodal work that can specify mechanisms but cannot, on their own, adjudicate effects on individuals over time. A future agenda implied by this cluster would combine the multimodal, affect-sensitive close reading of Nangle2026-yo with the cross-platform identity-work lens of Grusauskaite2026-po, all situated within the multi-level, hybrid socio-technical framework Rothut2026-wt argues the field now requires.