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Within the ubiquitous landscape of social media, far-right groups and actors have taken advantage of the ways content is produced and spread on mainstream social media platforms. Far-right groups, including the alt-right, are using social media in ways that entice people into far-right spaces that perpetuate hate online and in person. The alt-right spreads hateful messaging through Internet memes, and those who are unfamiliar with alt-right strategies may encounter these memes and engage with them. In this study, we examined whether parents of adolescents would engage with alt-right memes as well as if they understood the memes. We utilized a novel research design by presenting participants with memes and asking questions about engagement. We also included a measure of New Media Literacy to assess participants’ skills with navigating social media. Results reveal that a majority of parent participants would either knowingly interact with at least one alt-right meme or they were unable to discern the covert messaging in the alt-right memes. The impact of engagement with alt-right content on social media needs to be addressed in order to inform approaches to educate adults, especially parents, about how hateful ideologies spread on the Internet.
Burnham et al. (Fri,) studied this question.