As the field of terrorism studies evolves, there continues to be increasing interest in how the Internet and social media platforms are impacting extremist groups, militant movements, and individual radicalisation to violence. Especially with the rise of the Islamic State, and the migration of tens of thousands of foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq, there was urgent academic and policy concern about how ISIS’s glossy magazines, high-definition videos, and social media presence were contributing to this sudden spike in jihadist mobilisation around the world (Rudner, 2017; Barrett, 2017; Dawson & Amarasingam, 2017). Policy discussions soon followed, with substantial resources going into countering violent extremism (CVE) strategies (Vidino & Hughes, 2015; Berger & Perez, 2016; Winter et al., 2020; Clifford et al., 2020). Focus was also placed on deplatforming extremist content as well as new initiatives by social media companies to work together to ensure that their platforms were not exploited for harmful purposes (Amarasingam, 2021; GIFCT, 2017; Meleagrou-Hitchens & Kaderbhai, 2017). Other researchers looked more closely at the nexus between radicalisation and online extremist content (Koehler, 2014; Hassan et al., 2018; Odag et al., 2019) and how online networks are formed and developed among extremists (Ferrara, 2017; Veilleux-Lepage & Archambault, 2019; Caiani & Wagemann, 2009).
This rush to research, though, has produced staggered results: some regions have been ignored, and propaganda in languages other than Arabic and English remains understudied. For instance, based on a rudimentary Google Scholar search, there are over 50 articles on Dabiq and Rumiyah, the Islamic State’s English-language online magazine. Commendable work thus far has analysed visual strategies (Abdelrahim, 2019), the portrayal of particular countries in these magazines (Stempien, 2019), images of children (Kaczkowski, 2019), and calls to violence (Lakomy, 2019), among a host of other topics. Similarly, there have been numerous studies examining extremist online support networks as well as the impacts of deplatforming on these networks (Berger & Perez, 2016; Amarasingam et al., 2021; Pearson, 2018; Chandrasekharan et al., 2017; Conway et al., 2021; Alexander, 2017). What remains relatively understudied, however, is the importance of community for individuals who are radicalising in the online space. This is an area of research that is beginning to receive further attention and is coming to be seen as an important area that warrants further investigation. While numerous articles mention ‘online community’ or ‘virtual community’ in passing, there are only a handful of studies truly unpacking the concept or exploring its significance in the field. There are also different terminologies used in publications attempting to capture the phenomenon: online ecology (Conway et al., 2021), radical milieu (Conway, 2012), collective identity (Futrell & Simi, 2004), as well as cyberculture (Simi & Futrell, 2006).