Blog

Neophytos Georgiou, Flinders University Recent media reports have suggested neo-nazis in Australia may be actively trying to recruit autistic young men. Some research – including my own – suggests some autistic people may be more likely to engage with harmful content online, including conspiracy theories and extremist ideology. But this is a tricky area to ...

By Wyn Brodersen and Maik Fielitz Antisemitic content on TikTok rarely announces itself. It arrives as a number, an emoji, a joke about a hollow earth — and that is exactly what makes it spread. In February 2026, a local politician for Germany’s far-right AfD shared a video on Instagram. Its text asked whether “an ...

By J.M. Berger This article is an adapted and lightly edited excerpt from Online Extremism, a chapter in the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Online Violent Extremism. While the Internet can be and is used as a simple broadcasting tool for spreading ideas and ideologies to new audiences, its most powerful innovation was participation. Unlike radio ...

We are very pleased to announce that Routledge is publishing the Handbook of Online Violent Extremism on 29th September.  The Handbook is edited by Suraj Lakhani (University of Sussex), Stuart Macdonald (Swansea University), Julian Droogan (Macquarie University), and Lydia Khalil (Deakin University). The volume, running to around 40 chapters and drawing on more than 50 contributors, ...

Timothy Koskie, University of Sydney Popular encrypted messaging app Telegram failed to detect and remove pro-terrorist and extremist material, including videos of executions and attacks, a new lawsuit launched by Australia’s online watchdog alleges. The eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, announced in Sydney on Thursday morning she was taking legal action against Telegram in the ...

Welcome to Volume 13, Issue 9 of the monthly VOX-Pol Newsletter The Routledge Handbook of Online Violent Extremism We are very pleased to announce that Routledge is publishing the Handbook of Online Violent Extremism on 29th September and is available to pre-order now.  The Handbook is edited by Suraj Lakhani (University of Sussex), Stuart Macdonald (Swansea University), Julian ...

By Sören Henrich, Jeremiah Perez-Torres, Séan Looney, and Brigitte Naderer At this year’s Terrorism and Social Media (TASM) Conference, our goal was to hear from as many different voices in the field as possible as part of launching our project, “Crisis, Connectivity, and Meaning: Exploring Youth Extremism in the Digital Age”, funded by the Critical ...

As the new academic year gets underway, VOX-Pol is highlighting a suite of open-access digital resources designed to support university educators, researchers, and students focusing on online extremism and terrorism. From embeddable video presentations to a searchable literature database, these materials offer flexible assets for course development, classroom debates, and independent research. VOX-Pol Lecture Series ...

Welcome to Volume 13, Issue 8 of the monthly VOX-Pol Newsletter Back to the Classroom: VOX-Pol Resources to Support Your Teaching and Student Learning With the new academic year getting underway shortly, we wanted to draw attention to some of the VOX-Pol resources available to support your teaching and student learning and research on online ...

Marten Risius, The University of Queensland and Christopher David, Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences Eighty-one years after Adolf Hitler died by his own hand in a Berlin bunker, a viral video on TikTok shows an AI-generated vision of the Nazi dictator standing in Antarctica, shoulders broad and face smiling, sipping a White Monster Energy drink ...