The Strong Cities Network (SCN) conducted an online mapping exercise to investigate the main extremist narratives deployed in North Macedonia. Using a mixed method of automated collection and expert manual qualitative online research, SCN identified the main narratives across political, ethnic and religiously inspired extremist and hate groups. On the basis of these findings, SCN ...

This new report, a product of the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s new Quant Lab, is a systematic study of over a million posts over the past eighteen months on the world’s leading incels forum. By stripping language down to mathematics, we can eke out trends that provide real insight into incel communities. Our Quant ...

Terrorism, global pandemics, climate change, wars and all the major threats of our age have been targets of online extremism. The same social media occupying the heartland of our social world leaves us vulnerable to cybercrime, electoral fraud and the ‘fake news’ fuelling the rise of far-right violence and hate speech. In the face of ...

Terror attacks are followed by public shock and disorientation. Previous research has found that people use social media to collectively negotiate responses, interpretations, and sense-making in the aftermath of terror attacks. However, the role of ideologically motivated discussions and their relevance to the overall discourse have not been studied. This paper ad-dresses this gap and ...

The COVID-19 pandemic led to the creation of a new protest movement, positioned against government lockdowns, mandatory vaccines, and related measures. Efforts to control misinformation by digital platforms resulted in take downs of key accounts and posts. This led some of these protest groups to migrate to platforms with less stringent content moderation policies, such ...

The article explores Far Cry 5’s commentary on the rise of the radical right, domestic terrorism, and extremism in America. The game’s two primary modes for this narrative critique involve its use of Christian symbolism and its exploration of doomsday prepper culture. What emerges from this analysis is that Far Cry 5 provides a harrowing ...

This three-article dissertation focuses on cyber-related topics on terrorist groups, specifically Jihadists’ use of technology, the application of natural language processing, and social networks in analyzing text data derived from terrorists’ Dark Web forums. The first article explores cybercrime and cyberterrorism. As technology progresses, it facilitates new forms of behavior, including tech-related crimes known as ...

This report highlights the networks, supporters, and the platforms of Islamic State disinformation disseminators, focusing on popular social media platforms as well as encrypted messaging applications. These disinformation networks are creating self-branded media outlets with followers in the tens of thousands, and often with innocuous names like “Global Happenings,” “DRIL” and “Media Center,” to evade ...

This book explores the online strategies and presence of Salafi-Jihadi actors in the Nordic as well as the international context. Global Salafi-jihadism has been at the epicentre of international focus during the past decade. This book explores how the Swedish and other Nordic Salafi-jihadist sympathisers have used social digital media to radicalise, recruit, and propagate ...

Recent decades have seen a blurring of the line between extremist movements and mainstream politics, driven by rising sectarian polarization. This development has been linked to digital media, with suggestions that so-called echo chambers may drive political radicalization. To understand the social processes taking place inside such digital spaces, this article draws on Randall Collins ...