@piotrmarczynski.bsky.social, PhD candidate at @sciencepoulb.bsky.social whose research focuses on elites’ use of conspiracy theories, reflects on the results of the study:

🧵4/5

likewise;))

Many thanks to @burscott.bsky.social for early feedback on the draft, to the panelists and audience at the @ecpr-ead.bsky.social conference for the opportunity to present the paper and receive feedback, and everyone else who supported the project along the way 🙂

In sum: beneath the surface of online fitness culture lies a new front of ideological struggle.
The far right uses wellness to sell identity and belonging.
By naming this dynamic, we can better understand and challenge how reactionary ideas circulate through everyday social media interactions.

Here, we focused on how the revived format of 1940s men’s magazines operates in the online sphere, playing a key role in aestheticizing and monetizing the subculture. We then analyzed how subcultural leaders work to articulate a coherent reactionary wellness ideology.

Once the pivotal accounts were identified, we conducted semiotic discourse analysis to identify the discursive and visual tools used by actors to link wellness topics, like the keto diet or workout regimen, to the far-right talking points.

Empirically, this entailed conducting an SNA of 42 subculture members to identify key 'amplifiers', 'influencers' and, crucially, 'bridge-builders'. We found the ideologically motivated camp on the left to dominate over alt-wellness users (right).

We introduce “infrastructure of reaction” to show how far-right actors use bodybuilding discourses as a metapolitical space: traditional and digital media amplify each other, boosting both printed content and social media influencers.

In the article, we have focused on the self-proclaimed 'Barbarian Right' subculture of X, which explicitly morphs reactionary and wellness discourses, while exhibiting a high degree of heterogeneity, with the actors spanning from alt-wellness figures to far-right activists.

The idea for the article came from the seeming alignment of between far-right actors and alt-health, as documented by @naomiaklein.bsky.social in 'Doppelganger' and being algorithmically exposed myself to 'wellness' content coming from far-right adjacent figures.

Trzymajcie się tam w tym Poznaniu.

When was Dave Rubin leftist??