Right wing tendencies found in ambiguous German rock band Frei Wild
Right-Wing Rock or Just Rock? A Computational Linguistic Analysis of Frei.Wild
Computation and Language
Summary
Right-wing rock music often spreads extremist ideas and tries to recruit young people. The authors studied the band Frei.Wild to see if their music is right-wing or just regular German rock. Using language analysis and machine learning, they found that while Frei.Wild’s political stance is unclear, many of their songs lean toward right-wing ideas. Their computer methods can help spot extremist tendencies in music, especially in tricky cases.
What this means in practice
- •For content moderation teams: Automatically identify potentially right-wing extremist songs in music platforms to assist manual review and regulation.
- •For social media platform operators: Develop tools to flag ambiguous music content that may spread extremist political messages for better enforcement policies.
Authors
Carlotta Schneeberger, Kevin Tang
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 Frei.Wild, 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 Frei.Wild 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 Frei.Wild. The code and data are made available for future research.