The Angry "Like": Emotions in Anti-Islamic Facebook Groups. A Sentiment Analysis

The role emotions play in explanations of mobilization and collective action to the far- right. Despite this, attention to the effect of emotions on behaviour on social media engagement is lacking. This thesis thus sets out to answer: Does emotional content in far-right communities on social media lead to engagement? This thesis explores this question from a holistic perspective by combining the literature of resource mobilization and grievances with affective intelligence and previous studies on emotional contagion on social media to understand the processes that unfold. This thesis uses original data gathered from published posts on Stopp Islamiseringen av Norge (SIAN)’s Facebook group page between the 15th of December 2020 and 31st August 2021. By using a sentiment analysis on the data, the thesis finds that anger, disgust and fear are prevalent emotions in this textual content. Moreover, the findings show that anger in posts is found important to explain interaction with a post, by increasing the number of likes. This thesis suggests that processes of emotional contagion online are important to understand behaviour as a result of emotional stimuli in textual content. This novel and exploratory thesis is a first step toward better understanding the micro-level mechanisms involved in interaction behaviour in far-right spheres on social media and affirms the role of anger to understand these dynamics