@inproceedings{boholm-etal-2025-leads,
    title = "Who leads? Who follows? Temporal dynamics of political dogwhistles in {S}wedish online communities",
    author = {Boholm, Max  and
      Rettenegger, Gregor  and
      Breitholtz, Ellen  and
      Cooper, Robin  and
      Lindgren, Elina  and
      R{\"o}nnerstrand, Bj{\"o}rn  and
      Sayeed, Asad},
    editor = "Calabrese, Agostina  and
      de Kock, Christine  and
      Nozza, Debora  and
      Plaza-del-Arco, Flor Miriam  and
      Talat, Zeerak  and
      Vargas, Francielle",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the The 9th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.woah-1.34/",
    pages = "383--395",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-105-6",
    abstract = "A dogwhistle is a communicative act intended to broadcast a message only understood by a select in-group while going unnoticed by others (out-group). We illustrate that political dogwhistle behavior in a more radical community precedes the occurrence of the dogwhistles in a less radical community, but the reverse does not hold. We study two Swedish online communities {--} Flashback and Familjeliv {--} which both contain discussions of life and society, with the former having a stronger anti-immigrant subtext. Expressions associated with dogwhistles are substantially more frequent in Flashback than in Familjeliv. We analyze the time series of changes in intensity of three dogwhistle expressions (DWEs), i.e., the strength of association of a DWE and its in-group meaning modeled by Swedish Sentence-BERT, and model the dynamic temporal relationship of intensity in the two communities for the three DWEs using Vector Autoregression (VAR). We show that changes in intensity in Familjeliv are explained by the changes of intensity observed at previous lags in Flashback but not the other way around. This suggests a direction of travel for dogwhistles associated with radical ideologies to less radical contexts."
}