Historical revisionism, revision history and alternative online media eco-systems in Japan—a socio-political analysis of nationalist contestation and political propaganda in the digital age

Social media has over the past decade seen an undeniable increase in politicization and subsequent association with populist right-wing political actors. As a result, specialized jargon such as 'alt-right', 'fachosphère' or the Japanese 'Netto-Uyoku' (lit. 'Net-Right')—referring to a phenomenon of Internet-facilitated neo-nationalism—have in their respective languages entered the mainstream discourse. In the case of Japan, one pillar of various strands of neo-nationalism is the dissemination of highly revisionist takes on wartime history into public spaces, with a dual purpose of nationalist self-affirmation and xenophobe ‘othering’. As revisionist narratives spread from minor sub-cultural spaces into widespread platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, that process has increasingly flourished due to the inter-connectivity of social media. This PhD project will contribute to existing literature on that online strand of Japanese neo-nationalism by 1. bringing to light how neo-nationalist ideologues, within the technical and ethical boundaries of two mainstream online media platforms (YouTube and Wikipedia), attempt to push forms of historical revisionism as a form of political propaganda, and 2. revealing how, from a technical perspective, these platforms—built almost completely on user-generated and user-moderated content—facilitate the crossing of platform and language-dependent borders to reach audiences that succeed the initial inner circles of those ideologues.