@inproceedings{schneeberger-tang-2026-right,
title = "Right-Wing Rock or Just Rock? A Computational Linguistic Analysis of {F}rei.{W}ild",
author = "Schneeberger, Carlotta and
Tang, Kevin",
editor = "Atwell, Katherine and
Borah, Angana and
Dementieva, Daryna and
Kreiss, Elisa and
Kotonya, Neema and
Liu, Jiarui and
Olson, Liz and
Wan, Ruyuan and
Zhao, Jieyu",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on {NLP} for Positive Impact ({NLP}4{PI})",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlp4pi-1.32/",
pages = "375--394",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-495-8",
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."
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<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.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Right-Wing Rock or Just Rock? A Computational Linguistic Analysis of Frei.Wild
%A Schneeberger, Carlotta
%A Tang, Kevin
%Y Atwell, Katherine
%Y Borah, Angana
%Y Dementieva, Daryna
%Y Kreiss, Elisa
%Y Kotonya, Neema
%Y Liu, Jiarui
%Y Olson, Liz
%Y Wan, Ruyuan
%Y Zhao, Jieyu
%S Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI)
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-495-8
%F schneeberger-tang-2026-right
%X 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.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlp4pi-1.32/
%P 375-394
Markdown (Informal)
[Right-Wing Rock or Just Rock? A Computational Linguistic Analysis of Frei.Wild](https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlp4pi-1.32/) (Schneeberger & Tang, NLP4PI 2026)
ACL