A dialectical approach to online propaganda: Australia's United Patriots Front, right-wing politics and Islamic State

This paper examines how the United Patriots Front, an Australian far-right organization, has communicated its ideology with reference to right-wing politics in Australia, Western Europe, and the U.S., and through allusions to Islamic State. The investigation uses critical discourse and documentary analysis and a framework derived from the theory of Pierre Bourdieu to analyze textual and audiovisual postings on UPF Facebook pages, YouTube channels, and Twitter accounts. Relevant to the discussion are Bourdieu’s interdependent theories on “doxa”, as a condition in which socially-constructed phenomena appear self-evident, and “habitus” and “field”, which explain how structures and agents, through their reflexive behaviour, become dialectically situated.