Blog

By Brigitte Naderer & Carina Pleier In late 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice initiated a series of document releases under the provisions of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The initial release, which took place on 19 December 2025, encompassed a substantial volume of documentation, amounting to over 100,000 pages. This release included a wide ...

By Sam David UpScrolled, a social media platform for microblogging and short-form video sharing, experienced rapid growth in late January 2026 following disputes surrounding TikTok’s US operations. The expansion was initiated largely by allegations that protest-related content was being suppressed on mainstream platforms and, while independent verification of this is limited, the perception of such ...

By Alessandro Bolpagni, Eleonora Ristuccia, and Grazia Ludovica Giardini More than ten years ago, Halummu launched an online campaign entitled “Supporting Ribat and Jihad” to urge IS munasirin to spread IS propaganda material “to as many platforms and accounts as possible”, underlying that the “ongoing war between the camp of kufr and the camp of ...

By Christopher V. David and Marten Risius Extremist groups operate in an environment where trust is existential and suspicion is constant—every new member could be an ally or an informant. The Provisional IRA, for example, famously operated a dedicated squad tasked with tracking down and liquidating informers within their ranks. Though in a spectacular twist, ...

By Ellie Rogers As technology has developed, extremist actors have found new ways to use it to their advantage. Large language models (LLMs) are one area that has been exploited by extremists to create and share content. Introduction LLMs use natural language processing (NLP), and often artificial intelligence (AI), to process and generate text for ...

By Mischa Gerrard Online extremism research tends to treat gendered AI-enabled harms – such as non-consensual sexual deepfakes and synthetic child sexual abuse material (CSAM) – as peripheral to core radicalisation mechanisms. Yet these harms represent more than isolated safety problems. Rather, they function as early-stage enabling infrastructures through which new techniques of coercion, evidentiary ...

By Joshua Farrell-Molloy Only a decade ago, Ireland’s far right was barely visible. Its current form is rooted in 1990s anti-abortion activism, which shaped the political careers of figures Justin Barrett and James Reynolds, who in 2016 co-founded the National Party, Ireland’s largest far-right party. The 2018 abortion referendum provided an early incubation space for ...

By Bernadette Johnston Misogyny and problematic attitudes towards women are not new phenomena. What is new however is the speed and scale at which misogynistic ideas and related behaviours now circulate – particularly online. Problematic ‘nudification apps,’ whose sole purpose is to underdress and sexually transform photos of women online without their consent, have existed ...

By Gina Vale In December 2021, terrorism charges against a 14-year-old British girl were dropped—not due to lack of engagement with extremist networks, but on account of the power dynamics of her digital relationships therein. The Home Office Single Competent Authority (SCA) determined that she was a victim of modern slavery in the UK for ...

Michelle Lynn Kahn, University of Richmond How can society police the global spread of online far-right extremism while still protecting free speech? That’s a question policymakers and watchdog organizations confronted as early as the 1980s and ’90s – and it hasn’t gone away. Decades before artificial intelligence, Telegram and white nationalist Nick Fuentes’ livestreams, far-right ...