Right-Wing Rock or Just Rock? A Computational Linguistic Analysis of Frei.Wild

Title:Right-Wing Rock or Just Rock? A Computational Linguistic Analysis of Frei.Wild

Abstract:Rechtsrock is a subgenre of rock music that spreads right-wing ideology, often instrumentalized to recruit adolescents into the radical scene. Monitoring institutions counteract this by manually examining and, in some cases, banning extremist content; however, there are border cases that evade regulation. We present a study aimed at determining whether such a case, the band this http URL, should be classified as politically right-leaning or as part of the general German rock genre. We sampled a German rock dataset and created a corpus for right-wing rock to use as reference in this analysis and found that we can confirm the intuitions from previous investigations that this http URL successfully maintains an ambiguity with regard to their political affiliation. However, the tendency is towards the right-wing spectrum. Lexical analyses reveal nationalistic narratives and two high-performing classifiers (up to 97% ROC-AUC score) label more than half of their songs as right-wing extremist. Our analysis provides insight into how computational methods can improve the process of identifying right-wing extremist tendencies in music, especially in borderline cases like this http URL. The code and data are made available for future research.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2609.39460 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.39460v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.39460 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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