Flagging White Nationalism ‘After Cronulla’: From the Beach to the Net

TL;DR: The authors used a case study analysis of two white nationalist movements online, in the Australian context, to consider whether the prevalence and everyday uses of social media by white nationalist groups today has impacted on race relations and multiculturalism in Australia 12 years after the Cronulla riots.

Abstract: In this article, I use a case study analysis of two white nationalist movements online, in the Australian context, to consider whether the prevalence and everyday uses of social media by white nationalist groups today has impacted on race relations and multiculturalism in Australia 12 years after the Cronulla riots. Social media affordances present a set of conditions that were absent during the 2005 riot, and yet, are today mobilising distinct variants of white nationalism online. Rather than these expressions being locally situated, social media allows these performances to be connected up virtually, extending the white nationalists’ capacity to occupy and terrorise a range of networked public and intimate spaces and influence mainstream political culture. Nonetheless social media affordances, which situate these movements in a virtual ‘ecology of subcultures’ also contributes to their instability and ambivalence, with the uncivil ‘trolling’ practices of online movements undermining broader soci...