Post Type Description
A Philosophical and Historical Analysis of “Generation Identity”: Fascism, Online Media, and the European New Right
September 18, 2023This article analyzes ideological and organizational characteristics of the pan-European youth movement, “Generation Identity” (GI), through a philosophical and historical lens. With a synoptic perspective on existing and original research, it outlines an analysis of key GI literature as well as its ideological influences, activist behavior, and media strategies. This research reveals that, like other ...
Modeling Islamist Extremist Communications on Social Media using Contextual Dimensions: Religion, Ideology, and Hate
September 18, 2023Terror attacks have been linked in part to online extremist content. Although tens of thousands of Islamist extremism supporters consume such content, they are a small fraction relative to peaceful Muslims. The efforts to contain the ever-evolving extremism on social media platforms have remained inadequate and mostly ineffective. Divergent extremist and mainstream contexts challenge machine ...
A comparison of ISIS foreign fighters and supporters social media posts: an exploratory mixed-method content analysis
September 18, 2023This paper compares the social media posts of ISIS foreign fighters to those of ISIS supporters. We examine a random sample of social media posts made by violent foreign fighters (n = 14; 2000 posts) and non-violent supporters (n = 18; 2000 posts) of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) (overall n = 4,000 posts), from 2009 to 2015. We ...
Predicting Behavioural Patterns in Discussion Forums using Deep Learning on Hypergraphs
September 18, 2023Online discussion forums provide open workspace allowing users to share information, exchange ideas, address problems, and form groups. These forums feature multimodal posts and analyzing them requires a framework that can integrate heterogeneous information extracted from the posts, i.e. text, visual content and the information about user interactions with the online platform and each other. ...
Self-regulation and ‘hate speech’ on social media platforms
September 18, 2023In this brief, ARTICLE 19 seeks to contribute to discussions on greater regulation of social media platforms, including calls for such platforms to be considered publishers. We do so by exploring a possible model for the independent and effective self regulation of social media platforms. ARTICLE 19 recognises that dominant social media companies hold considerable ...
Elites and foreign actors among the alt-right: The Gab social media platform
September 18, 2023Content regulation and censorship of social media platforms is increasingly discussed by governments and the platforms themselves. To date, there has been little data-driven analysis of the effects of regulated content deemed inappropriate on online user behavior. We therefore compared Twitter — a popular social media platform that occasionally removes content in violation of its ...
Mainstreamed online extremism demands a radical new response
September 18, 2023Online extremism has changed, and censorship by content removal or account suspension alone cannot counteract it. We need a radical new response, argues Louis Reynolds. ...
What is Gab? A Bastion of Free Speech or an Alt-Right Echo Chamber?
September 18, 2023Over the past few years, a number of new “fringe” communities, like 4chan or certain subreddits, have gained traction on the Web at a rapid pace. However, more often than not, little is known about how they evolve or what kind of activities they attract, despite recent research has shown that they influence how false ...
Antisemitismus 2.0 und die Netzkultur des Hasses
September 18, 2023Judenfeindschaft als kulturelle Konstante und kollektiver Gefühlswert im digitalen Zeitalter (Kurzfassung) In welchen Manifestationen tritt Antisemitismus im 21. Jahrhundert in Erscheinung? Wie, wo und von wem werden judenfeindliche Inhalte artikuliert und verbreitet? Welche Stereotype werden kodiert, welche Argumente benutzt? Welche Rolle spielen Emotionen und irrationale Affektlogik beim aktuellen Einstellungs- und Verbalantisemitismus? Inwiefern hat das Internet ...
‘The Baghdadi Net’: How A Network of ISIL-Supporting Accounts Spread Across Twitter
September 18, 2023Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIL) supporters fanned out large amounts of Arabic content across Twitter all through the week in the wake of the news surrounding the death of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. Many accounts were exhibiting strong and multiple signals of automated behavior1, spawning every hour, on the hour, and Institute for ...