Author: alaskaadmin

Hate communities often flourish online for years, raising the question of how they persist. My research team has found that powerful stories keep members of a hate group galvanized, either by repeating the story over and over or by constantly adding fresh accusations and interpretations to it.

I’m a computational social scientist who studies social and political networks. My colleagues and I uncovered these trends by examining 10 years of posts, reactions and participation patterns in Facebook groups that shared antisemitic and Islamophobic content. Our findings have been accepted at the 2026 International Conference on Web and Social Media.

First, we measured who was posting and how that related to engagement on a site. Groups in which a small number of people produced most of the content tended to attract more reactions and responses. Then we looked at subjects the group members discussed – religion, immigration, geopolitics – and the kinds of stories members told about those topics, such as describing an entire group of people as criminals or warning that certain types of people are secretly taking over a country’s way of life.

When we put these pieces together, we discovered some clear patterns. Messages posted by a few very active people were strongly associated with higher site engagement in the form of likes and shares in the near term. And repetition – espousing the same ideas again and again – was an effective tactic. We also found that when many users kept adding fresh accusations, conspiracy theories and explanations, a group tended to persist. Very uniform content that used the same framing led to less engagement over time.

Different communities seemed to be drawn to different messaging patterns. In Islamophobic groups, the most prolific posters tended to repeat a narrow, consistent set of messages. Often these were religiously framed posts that portrayed Muslims as morally condemned. In antisemitic groups, the most engaged members were more likely to impart a mix of narratives, from tales of victimization to conspiracy theories about public figures.

Why it matters

Our findings suggest that hate communities can sustain themselves in various ways, so efforts to moderate them should consider these variations. If a few voices drive the conversation, removing them could quiet the noise. If new stories constantly appear from many contributors, harmful ideas may survive even if a few key online accounts are taken down. Hate networks can persist even after social media platforms ban specific groups or accounts.

It is also important to understand how stories can make prejudice feel justified and emotionally compelling. Extremist stories may claim that a group is under attack, that outsiders are dangerous or subhuman, or that violence is the only way to stay safe. Groups seen as outsiders – such as immigrants – are common targets, and they may be described as an “invasion” that threatens the nation.

What other research is being done

Researchers are finding that extremist ideas are now spreading through looser networks where many voices contribute and messaging can vary widely. That could affect whether engagement in the future still depends on consistent repetition or novelty. Some investigators are also scrutinizing how harmful language, conspiracy theories and propaganda evolve over time.

What’s next

Another important direction is tracking how hate narratives are spread by public figures and influencers, how the narratives move between online platforms, and how they surface in offline groups and efforts to organize supporters, all of which can normalize harmful ideas. My group is starting to study how this amplification works: who shares which narratives and why, which kinds of people become bridges across different online platforms, and how those roles shape which messages spread.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Yu-Ru Lin’s research has received federal funding, including National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense (DARPA, AFOSR, Minerva, and ONR). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding sources.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

If you follow the Trump administration’s social media posts, you might spot its new mascot: a cartoon lump of coal with big eyes and babylike features. “Coalie” sparked a backlash almost as soon as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum debuted it for the Office of Surface Mining and Reclamation Enforcement in early 2026.

Coalie’s design draws on a type of Japanese anime called Kawaii, a word meaning “cute” or “adorable.” It’s the latest in the White House’s efforts to pass off coal as harmless, despite the well-established environmental and human health harms of mining and burning the fossil fuel.

As a scholar of American literature and culture, I write about media portrayals of coal, beginning in the 19th century with its rise to become the leading fuel in the United States. Coal use grew until the early 2000s, when other sources became cheaper and its health and environmental damage became unacceptable to more of the public.

While “Coalie” might be new, the logic behind it is not. For centuries, coal’s promoters have worked hard to show coal as harmless – as well as “clean” and “beautiful,” to use President Donald Trump’s words.

‘An agreeable heat’

Humans living with the effects of burning coal have disliked it for as long as they have burned it.

In 1578, Queen Elizabeth complained that she was “greatly grieved and annoyed with [its] taste and smoke” in the air. In 1661, John Evelyne’s treatise Fumifugium outlined negative health effects of breathing coal smoke.

English settlers were drawn to North America in part because of the continent’s abundant supply of timber, a substitute for coal that deforestation had made prohibitively expensive in England.

But by the 19th century, the price of timber had risen in America as well. When, in the 1820s, news spread of Pennsylvania’s rich veins of anthracite coal, urban consumers were eager for a cheaper source of fuel.

In addition to its lower price, anthracite coal grew desirable because of its high carbon, low-sulfur content, which produced less visible smoke when it was burned. An enthusiastic 1815 letter to the editor of the American Daily Advertiser captured increasingly common attitudes toward anthracite as “affor[ding] a very regular and agreeable heat.”

‘A healthful home’

The spread of anthracite also shored up tolerance for smokier but cheaper bituminous coal.

To help people, housekeeping manuals aimed at the fossil fuel’s mostly female users tried to invent workarounds for its smoke. In 1869, Harriet Beecher Stowe, best known as the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and her sister Catharine Beecher wrote one of many 19th-century articles to acknowledge the “evils” of coal smoke, while outlining “modes of making a healthful home,” in the housekeeping manual American Woman’s Home.

Consumers provided temporary solutions for maintaining indoor air quality while burning coal by sending in suggestions that were published in housekeeping manuals, magazines and newspapers.

At the same time, as the century progressed, coal and coal-stove companies began to suggest that burning coal was healthy, that it could improve indoor air as well as domestic aesthetics. One 1892 newspaper advertisement claimed that stoves were “necessary to heat, cheer, and beautify the home and preserve its health.”

To keep the children clean and bright …

In the 20th century, marketers churned out more colorful claims about the benefits of coal: One magazine advertisement showed a mother and child pointing at the crackling stove aflame with the company’s coal, saying it “cannot be excelled in purity, cleanliness, and free-burning qualities.”

Similarly, the Lackawanna Railroad Company came up with the classy, often rhyming, character of Phoebe Snow. In one ad, she points to the importance of comfort, suggesting that not only could anthracite fuel faster travel, but it could also make your travel – and your life – more comfortable.

Coal marketing often used children to suggest safety and reach parents. Another iteration of the Phoebe Snow series promised that anthracite-powered railway travel could keep children “clean and bright.”

A 1930s advertisement went so far as to position a piece of anthracite coal next to a child in a bathtub, a visual proximity implying that coal was as good as soap.

In fact, soap made of “coal tar” – a liquid byproduct of producing coke, a fuel made from bituminous coal used in industrial blast furnaces – did (and does) exist. The British company Wright’s, also popular in the U.S., generated a slew of advertisements praising its soap as having antiseptic properties for children.

Each of these advertisements tried to capitalize on a mother’s desire for healthy children. And they pushed back against the image of the tyrannical “King Coal” that had come about amid strikes by miners protesting dangerous, degraded working and living conditions as well as the rise of black lung disease.

‘Clean coal’

By the mid-20th century, petroleum took coal’s place as America’s main energy source. The U.S. environmental movement continued to grow, and people got interested in natural gas as an alternative to coal.

In response, coal companies doubled down on the fantasy of “clean” coal.

A 1979 advertisement for American Electric Power, for example, flew in the face of Clean Air Act mandates that coal corporations employ “scrubbing” technology to remove sulfur dioxide from smoke – the ad depicted someone cleaning coal by hand.

The myth continues

Today, coal generates only 16.2% of America’s electricity, down from generating more than half of the U.S. power supply in the 1990s. But the country isn’t done with it. Even though coal production today is far below its peak, as companies try to shut down old uneconomic plants, Trump has promised to “reinvigorate” the coal industry.

In addition to ordering some coal plants to continue operating, the Trump administration has pulled out old coal promotion tactics from the past, including repeatedly referring to coal as “clean and beautiful.” One image inserts Coalie next to a coal-mining family that otherwise looks like an ad that could have appeared a century ago.

And, like its predecessors, this picture tries to present an innocent image of a product that harms human health and the environment.

A 2018 study found that black lung disease was on the rise in Appalachia, where about 40% of America’s coal is mined today. Living near a fossil-fuel power plant exposes residents to pollutants that contribute to premature deaths, asthma and lung cancer, including tiny particulate matter known at PM 2.5, sulfur dioxide and mercury. Even when it’s just sitting in piles waiting to be used at a power plant, coal can harm human health as the wind blows across it and carries coal dust into the air and people’s lungs.

The myth of coal as healthy and family friendly has been around for centuries – but coal has never been clean, or cute.

Annie Persons does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation