Standing Up for Sweden? The Racist Discourses, Architectures and Affordances of an Anti-Immigration Facebook Group

Facebook has faced growing criticism regarding its handling of hateful user-generated content(UGC) with research revealing how the platform can foster both covert and overt racism. Thisresearch has tended to focus on racist content while relying on abstract references to the generallogics of social media platforms. In this article we consider how Facebook shapes the production ofracist discourse in more concrete ways by integrating a concern for the platform’s architecturesand affordances within a broader analysis of the immigration-related discussions of a largeSwedish Facebook group. We combine a quantitative topic modeling of a large data set of thegroup’s UGC with a qualitative critical discourse analysis (CDA) of a sample of that data set. Ourfindings show how Facebook enables and influences various discursive strategies of identificationand persuasion—within which covert and overt racist discourses are embedded—through pro-cesses of cybertyping, role-playing, crowdsourcing and (counter-)reaction.