The plausible deniability playbook: How white victimhood narratives evade moderation 

New Series, Vol. 2, No. 23

This study investigates the rhetorical strategy of white victimhood and how such rhetoric evades moderation on social media (i.e., X, formerly Twitter) to spread bigoted, white nationalist content. The authors focus on everyday social media activity and explore how individuals posting engage in “white laundering” or the use of seemingly positive messaging to mask the white supremacist nature of content. More specifically, this content perpetuates traditional notions of white victimhood and more subtle expressions of white desire to view whiteness positively. These strategies are effective because platform moderation is designed to detect overt racism and specific hashtags, which were not employed in the high engagement posts examined by the authors. Purposeful misspelling and character replacement are also common strategies used to evade platform moderation. 

White nationalist discourse generally reflects white supremacist values such as racial separatism, promoting a white ethnostate, preservation of white hegemony, and protection and preservation of white identity and culture in response to “threats” of diversity and multiculturalism. Victimhood is a key element of far-right discourse and co-opts the language of marginality, identity politics, and multiculturalism. Further, it seeks to separate whiteness from domination and reframe white Americans as a disadvantaged and marginalized group, and reframe diversity, multiculturalism, and discourse about white privilege as forms of racism that threaten and victimize them. In other words, discomfort stemming from being confronted about white privilege is construed as evidence of marginalization, even though this population generally consists of objectively well-off Americans.  

A total of 154 racist posts from X (formerly Twitter) were gathered for preliminary analysis, which involved assessing engagement (i.e., likes and retweets) to calculate an average for success in being seen, shared, and responded to. The average was 2,026 interactions, and all posts above this average were classified as high engagement, while those below were classified as low engagement. The majority, 91%, of high-engagement posts did not include hashtags, but 72% did include media content (i.e., photos or videos). These posts were also subject to coding processes for discourse and computational text analysis. Discourse analysis examines the use of language to shape meaning, relationships, and power within a given context. In contrast, computational text analysis utilizes computer programs to identify patterns, themes, or trends in large amounts of written text. Combining these methods yielded richer results than either would have if employed alone.  

Several key findings emerged from the data, one of which being direct claims of white victimhood. The language of such claims is racially coded in that it depicts people of color as inherently violent, treats diminishing white power as anti-white violence, focuses on alleged harm to white people, de-centers harm to people of color, and leverages plausible deniability. People of color are also covertly referred to via codewords (e.g., “thug,” “gang,” “criminal migrant”) and depicted as “racialized bogeymen” (e.g., Black Lives Matter) who harm white people. Because these posts do not explicitly mention people of color, it is harder for moderators to identify them as racist.  

Another manifestation of the white victimhood narrative on social media is the notion that antiracism and general discourse about racism and white privilege elicit negative emotions in white people and are perceived as a character attack. These posts claim that white people are “forced” to feel guilty, and reactions to this discomfort include statements like not being “sorry for being white.” Some posts were also hyperbolic and expressed fear of the consequences of being called racist. Some went even further to claim that racism was eradicated with the abolition of slavery and is not a modern-day issue.  

Unfortunately, the effectiveness of the deniability tactics discussed in this study is demonstrated in the successful mainstreaming of white nationalism in the U.S. Examples of this include positions of central powers that stereotype and persecute marginalized groups such as immigrants, Latino men, and Black people and rising authoritarianism influencing an overall reduction of moderation on social media platforms by reclassifying it as censorship. Moreover, the white nationalist views expressed in these social media posts are being construed as conservatism, effectively normalizing this language and these ideals. 

Communication Currents Discussion Questions 

For additional suggestions about how to use this and other Communication Currents in the classroom, see: https://www.natcom.org/publications/communication-currents/integrating-communication-currents-classroom 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS  

Rachel Marks is an Instructor of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida. 

Mel Stanfill is an Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Central Florida. 

This essay, by R. E. Purtell, translates the scholarly journal article, R. Marks & M. Stanfill (2025). The plausible deniability playbook: how white victimhood narratives evade moderation, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2025.2563831  

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