Anonymous online groups such as imageboards have increasing cultural influence. Recently, they have been connected with far-right political movements. This mixed-methods study investigates politics on Overboard, a Finnish imageboard. We use a convolutional neural network to learn linguistic features of the community’s own understanding of politics, studying two large text corpora, collected in 2014–2015 and 2018–2019. This enables us to find political messages in nominally non-political subforums and discount non-political “noise”—finding the “needles in the haystack.” We quantify the prevalence of political talk on Overboard, assess its themes using topic modeling, and evaluate changes in their popularity. Finally, we qualitatively analyze the style of Overboard. We find that around one-tenth of messages on Overboard are identifiable as “political.” Often, but not univocally, they voice far-right opinions, usually somewhat ironically. The prevalence of far-right themes has increased, likely because of importing global imageboard culture and in parallel with the increased popularity of nationalist-right politics in the broader Finnish public sphere. In terms of group style, the strong boundary between members and outsiders, together with the ironic and cynical speech norms, creates a bond between members. Such a group style lends itself to politicizing the collective.

诸如图像板之类的匿名在线团体具有越来越大的文化影响力。最近，他们与极右翼的政治运动有关。这项混合方法的研究调查了芬兰Imageboard Overboard上的政治情况。我们使用卷积神经网络来学习社区自身对政治的理解的语言学特征，研究了2014-2015年和2018-2019年收集的两个大型文本语料库。这使我们能够在名义上非政治性的子论坛中找到政治信息，并打折非政治性的“噪音”，从而找到“大海捞针”。我们量化Overboard上政治演讲的盛行程度，使用主题建模评估其主题，并评估其受欢迎程度的变化。最后，我们定性分析了Overboard的风格。我们发现Overboard上大约有十分之一的消息被识别为“政治性”。他们经常（但并非唯一）发表极右翼的意见，通常有些讽刺意味。极右翼主题的流行有所增加，这可能是由于导入了全球形象的文化，以及民族主义右翼政治在更广泛的芬兰公共领域中日益普及所致。就群体风格而言，成员与局外人之间的牢固界限以及讽刺和愤世嫉俗的言语规范在成员之间建立了纽带。这样的团体风格很容易使集体政治化。可能是由于导入了全球宣传画板文化，同时还伴随着民族主义权利政治在更广泛的芬兰公共领域中日益普及。就群体风格而言，成员与局外人之间的牢固界限以及讽刺和愤世嫉俗的言语规范在成员之间建立了纽带。这样的团体风格很容易使集体政治化。可能是由于导入了全球宣传画板文化，同时还伴随着民族主义权利政治在更广泛的芬兰公共领域中日益普及。就群体风格而言，成员与局外人之间的牢固界限以及讽刺和愤世嫉俗的言语规范在成员之间建立了纽带。这样的团体风格很容易使集体政治化。