Don’t catch the woke mind virus: Social justice terminology as meme in the right-wing Twitter ecosystem

Seeking to understand how racist content circulates on Twitter, we identified several repeated phrases, or memes – ‘diversity is a code’, ‘diversity means chasing down’, ‘antiwhites deny white genocide’, ‘genocide in South Africa’, ‘woke go broke’, and ‘woke mind virus’ – that use social justice terminology and span from general conservatism to white nationalism. Despite apparently disparate rhetoric in the memes, they had shared users and topics of discussion, leading us to investigate how ideas and people circulate across both ideological and social media networks. In this article, we analyze the network structure of who tweeted these memes and whether they were widespread or concentrated, conduct a content analysis of their shared topics, and use discourse analysis to unpack the ideologies they represent. We argue that these tweets that package conservative ideology into memes using progressive terminology provide a window into how users and ideas travel across right-wing networks, gaining traction and visibility by reusing and remixing these phrases.