The digital ethnonation: Multimodal extreme-right propaganda and national identity on YouTube

This article examines how the Greek extreme‐right party Golden Dawn harnessed YouTube to propagate nationalist propaganda through sophisticated multimodal strategies that integrate text, imagery, and audio. By blending enduring nationalist narratives with the unique affordances of digital platforms, Golden Dawn’s content demonstrates the resilience and adaptability of extreme‐right movements within contemporary media ecologies. Employing Digital Ethnonationalism, the study provides a theoretical lens to understand how national identity is reconstructed and mobilized in dynamic, networked environments. Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), the research scrutinizes Golden Dawn’s online material to reveal a complex combination of cultural narratives, emotional appeals, and audiovisual cues that reinforce an exclusionary ideological framework. The findings show that Golden Dawn’s digital discourse functions as a flexible mechanism of ideological activation, using emotive content to sustain allegiances and consolidate support even in the face of legal and societal challenges. These insights contribute to academic debates on populism, nationalism, extremism, and political communication, while offering new directions for future research on the transnational dynamics of extreme‐right mobilization in the digital age.