Digital platforms have become key arenas for digital nationalism, where humor and cultural symbols shape collective identities under conflict. The top-down approach of military objectives intertwines with bottom-up virality mechanisms. Examining government and grassroots meme campaigns during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this work shows how narrative framing—from victimhood to antagonism—mobilizes both domestic and global publics in different ways. The study reveals how networked storytelling and affect operate as instruments of influence in memetic warfare.

Moderation policies aim to reduce harm online, yet banning conspiratorial communities can trigger migration and reformation elsewhere. Comparing users of banned Reddit groups with their counterparts on Voat, this study shows that conspiracy networks reconstruct their social ties and activity levels after deplatforming, sustaining both engagement and toxicity. The results underscore the adaptive resilience of conspiratorial ecosystems, calling for moderation strategies that account for cross-platform behavior.

Political advertising on social media exposes how parties tailor messages to different audiences within algorithmic environments. This study analyzes over 45,000 Facebook ad campaigns from populist and mainstream parties across five EU countries, showing how populist movements achieve disproportionate reach through targeted appeals to gendered and age-specific demographics. The results highlight how populist communication adapts to platform logics, reinforcing national narratives while remaining ideologically fluid.

Online political engagement depends on how users shift attention across communities. This paper proposes an attention-flow graph that captures user migration between subreddits, identifying gateways and bridges that connect mainstream, conspiratorial, and extremist spaces. The analysis shows how conspiracy forums can act as intermediaries in radicalization pathways, mapping the structural channels through which political audiences reorganize.

Political advertising on social media exposes how algorithmic targeting intersects with nationalist discourse and demographic bias. By analyzing over two thousand migration-related campaigns from the Facebook Ads Library, this study uncovers how anti-immigration messages reach audiences differentiated by gender, age, and location, amplifying visibility among groups aligned with nationalist sentiment. The results reveal how algorithmic mediation reinforces cultural divides, showing that persuasion in digital politics depends as much on audience composition as on ideology.

The idea that social media create echo chambers overlooks how users actually interact across partisan lines. Studying millions of comments around the 2016 U.S. elections, this analysis finds that cross-cutting exchanges between Trump and Clinton supporters were more frequent than within-group ones, though asymmetrical and demographically patterned. The findings challenge the dominant polarization narrative, showing how political interaction networks can sustain contact even amid ideological division.

Targeted advertising plays a crucial role in the mobilization of nationalist and nativist narratives. Analyzing thousands of Facebook campaigns about immigration, this study shows how parties deploy demographic targeting—by gender, age, and region—to reinforce alignment with anti-immigration sentiment. The findings illustrate how algorithmic personalization operationalizes ideology, embedding far-right communication within the infrastructure of digital campaigning.

The rise of digital nationalism on social media reveals how collective identities form around feedback and recognition. By predicting early Trump supporters on Reddit, this work tests competing sociological mechanisms—homophily, influence, and feedback—and finds that community reinforcement and social mirroring outweigh direct persuasion. The analysis shows how far-right mobilization emerges from everyday interaction dynamics, where belonging and affirmation become drivers of political identity.