“Deplorable” Satire: Alt-Right Memes, White Genocide Tweets, and Redpilling Normies.
September 18, 2023
In the past decade, people associated with what is known as the alt-right have employed a strategy similar to that of progressive, antiracist satirists to advance a decidedly white supremacist, anti-Semitic, misogynist, and deadly serious agenda. As this article documents, the alt-right weaponizes irony to attract and radicalize potential supporters, challenge progressive ideologies and institutions, ...
Triggered by Defeat or Victory? Assessing the Impact of Presidential Election Results on Extreme Right-Wing Mobilization Online
September 18, 2023
The theoretical literature from criminology, social movements, and political sociology, among others, includes diverging views about how political outcomes could affect movements. Many theories argue that political defeats motivate the losing side to increase their mobilization while other established models claim the winning side may feel encouraged and thus increase their mobilization. We examine these ...
Misogynistic Men Online: How the Red Pill Helped Elect Trump
September 18, 2023
Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory was a shock for feminist scholars, yet it was no surprise to his legion of supporters in alt-right digital spaces. In this essay, we analyze one of the online forums that helped propel Trump to electoral victory. Drawing on social movement concepts and an analysis of 1,762 posts, we show ...
Hate Speech and Radicalisation Online The OCCI Research Report
September 18, 2023
The research series Hate Speech and Radicalisation on the Internet provides interdisciplinary insights into the current developments of extremist activities on the internet. With the aid of expert contributions from all over Germany, the psychological, political, anthropological and technological aspects of online hate speech and radicalisation will be considered and recommendations will be made for ...
Challenges and Frontiers in Abusive Content Detection
September 18, 2023
Online abusive content detection is an inherently difficult task. It has received considerable attention from academia, particularly within the computational linguistics community, and performance appears to have improved as the field has matured. However, considerable challenges and unaddressed frontiers remain, spanning technical, social and ethical dimensions. These issues constrain the performance, efficiency and generalizability of ...
Prototype and Analytics for Discovery and Exploitation of Threat Networks on Social Media
September 18, 2023
Identifying and profiling threat actors are high priority tasks for a number of governmental organizations. These threat actors may operate actively, using the Internet to promote propaganda, recruit new members, or exert command and control over their networks. Alternatively, threat actors may operate passively, demonstrating operational security awareness online while using their Internet presence to ...
Fanaticism, Racism, and Rage Online: Corrupting the Digital Sphere
September 18, 2023
Fanaticism, Racism, and Rage Online is a critical exploration of digital hate culture and its myriad infiltrations into the modern online community. The book examines radical movements that have emerged both on the fringes of the Internet, as well as throughout the web’s most popular spaces where extremist voices now intermix with mainstream politics and ...
Bookmarks – A manual for combating hate speech online through human rights education (2020 Revised edition)
September 18, 2023
This revised edition of Bookmarks reflects the end of the coordination of the youth campaign by the Council Europe. The campaign may be officially over, but the education and awareness-raising to counter hate speech and promote human rights values remain an urgent task for young people of all ages. The work of the Council of ...
Starting Points for Combating Hate Speech Online
September 18, 2023
Young People Combating Hate Speech Online is a project of the Council of Europe’s youth sector running between 2012 and 2015. The project aims to combat racism and discrimination in their online expression of hate speech by equipping young people and youth organisations with the competences necessary to recognize and act against such human rights ...
Bots, Fake News and The Anti-Muslim Message on Social Media
September 18, 2023
• In this report, we show how recent terror attacks in the UK have been successfully exploited by anti-Muslim activists over social media, to increase their reach and grow their audiences. • Monitoring key anti-Muslim social media accounts and their networks, we show how even small events are amplified through an international network of activists. ...