ABSTRACT

This chapter analyzes the organizational and potential mobilizational structure of the online communities of the European and American extreme right, delving into the structural properties of connections among these extreme right groups. By applying a social network analysis to the online contacts between organizations, our goal is to explore the organizational structure of the extreme right, reflecting on specific actors' visibility, configurations of power, as well as alliances and potential conflicts between these groups. The American network appears even more fragmented and dispersed than the Italian and British ones, with many isolated organizations. Political parties have higher betweenness in the United Kingdom than elsewhere, where instead they appear as lacking intermediation power. The Italian and British extreme right networks appear to be very fragmented, highly diversified and difficult to coordinate, whereas the German network is denser and much more concentrated on a few central actors.