This report analyses public-private relations between the European (in particular, French) authorities and Facebook, Google (YouTube) and Twitter on the subject of terrorist usage of social media between 2015 and 2019. In a qualitative approach, interview material is mobilised to investigate lived experiences of this early cooperation, focusing on how stakeholders defined and negotiated their ...

Online terrorism has been subject to significant change over the past twenty years. An appreciation of the roles of the Internet in terrorism was, like the Web itself, still nascent at the time of 9/11. An early focus on cyberterrorism was nevertheless, even then, giving way to a realisation that the Internet’s affordances were already ...

The gaming ecosystem is increasingly observed with the concern that it could pose a threat to public safety, and research accumulates evidence for blatant extremism in the surrounding online space of games. Currently, a connection between gaming and extremism can be established through identity related processes, e.g., gaming-related radicalization elements, distal to gaming itself, such ...

The closed-door roundtable took place on 31 March 2025, and included both presentations across three sessions and participants from academia, civil society, advocacy groups, legal non-profit organisations and the private sector. The event provided a space to discuss online hate speech and discriminatory rhetoric – ranging from antisemitism, misogyny and anti-LGBTQI+ narratives to racism and ...

Researchers of risky topics have benefitted from a burgeoning literature on researcher safety, including that specifically focused on researching the far right. Much of this literature has focused on tackling urgent concerns and providing practical advice, targeting the individual and the institution. Drawing on 21 interviews with researchers of the far right and manosphere, this report complements these efforts by detailing ...

The issue of radicalization has drawn significant attention over the last decade, as high-profile mobilizations and far-right violence grow increasingly prevalent in the United States. This has been accompanied by a particular interest in radicalization in the online context, as far-right recruitment and organizing increasingly leverages the affordances of digital platforms. In this dissertation, I ...

Far-right and involuntary celibate extremists are said to populate an “online extremist ecosystem” of digital media environments. Online violent extremists are said to use this “ecosystem” to access outcomes that were previously unattainable. Yet there remained fundamental knowledge gaps in understanding the advantageous and limits of using ecosystems to understand and address far-right and involuntary ...

This report reviews recent literature on youth recruitment to criminal, terror, and hate organizations within the context of Meta’s Tier system to help understand the dynamics of youth recruitment into Tier 1 DOIs and provide actionable insights for platforms’ efforts to enforce against content and actors involved in DOI recruitment. A case study from each ...

This article explores how cyberspace and social media are being used as instruments for the growth of extremist discourse in Malaysia—83% of militant detainees charged under anti-terrorism laws relied on social media platforms to access materials and establish virtual networking with likeminded individuals. The internet also provides a conducive environment for the incubation and growth ...

In this article, we use network science to explore the topology of the Islamic State’s “terrorist bot” network on the online social media platform Telegram, empirically identifying its connections to the Islamic State supporter-run groups and channels that operate across the platform, with which these bots form bipartite structures. As part of this, we examine ...