This study explores the politics of naming in the Islamic state (IS) media networks, looking into how sympathisers’ (munāsir-s) virtual identities are socially constructed online. Naming is a discursive practice which is purely ideological in that when sympathisers name themselves online, they re-imagine their roles and the boundaries of their national belonging alongside cultural representations ...

The journey inside Facebook’s semiosphere revolves around the present-day controversy on how algorithms foster polarization and discord in one of the biggest and most popular social media platforms, namely, Facebook. The present work focuses on the so-called Facebook Files as a specific case study. By drawing on these investigations, the present study discusses what are the principles ...

This work explores personalities of individuals at risk of Islamist radicalisation. Previous studies have successfully identified radicalised individuals on social media. However, a more prophylactic approach to counter radical communities would be to detect individuals prior to getting radicalised. A manually annotated dataset of 15,195 tweets from 259 persons believed to be at risk of ...

The October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel marked a pivotal moment not only in Middle East security policy but also in the global Islamist and particularly jihadi propaganda landscape. This article examines how the ensuing digital “victimhood-revenge” narrative rapidly spread across platforms like TikTok, fueling a new wave of radicalization among adolescents in Europe. ...

Since the inception of video games, extremist groups have been able create, modify, and weaponise this media for activism and their campaigns. More recently, however, the emergence of gaming-adjacent platforms (most notably Discord, Twitch and Steam) has become a key organisational tool for recruitment and community-building; something that policing communities all over the world have ...

This paper critically examines the role of social media algorithms in amplifying terrorist recruitment efforts in Northern Nigeria. It argues that while platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter) are designed to optimize user engagement, their algorithmic logic often favors sensational and polarizing content including extremist propaganda. Terrorist groups such as Boko Haram ...

The article analyzes the online humorous practices and discursive conventions of a far-right Russian Telegram community during a sociopolitical crisis. A sample of 130 disparagement jokes is examined to find out how existential uncertainty, created by the outbreak of a full-scale war, affects the far-right humorous othering. The jokes were published in a Local Crew ...

Gore-related websites enable the hosting and sharing of illegal videos, including those produced by proscribed terrorist entities. The websites are numerous, free to access, provide no user or child safety features, and have seen a growth in visitor numbers in recent years due to ongoing conflicts. Most gore-related websites offer download and social media share ...

Given that terrorism is omnipresent on social media, it is imperative to study how seeing terror content online is related to individuals’ attitudes, behaviors, and emotions. This study investigates how exposure to terrorism on social media associates with terror-related online self-disclosure and how self-disclosure, in turn, relates to fear of terrorism. A quota-based survey of ...

Unlike one-to-one threats, terrorist threat texts constitute a form of violence and a language crime that is committed in a complex context of public intimidation, and are communicated publicly and designed strategically to force desired sociopolitical changes . Contributing to law enforcement and threat assessors’ fuller understanding of the discursive nature of threat texts in ...