The Iron March Forum and the Evolution of the “Skull Mask” Neo-Fascist Network
September 18, 2023
The backbone of the “skull mask” transnational neo-fascist accelerationist network—whose nodes include terror groups such as Atomwaffen, the Base, and Feuerkrieg Division—is a group of organizations that grew out of Iron March, a neo-fascist web forum that was active from 2011 to 2017. The history of the Iron March network shows that violent extremist movements ...
Can the Right Meme? (And How?): A Comparative Analysis of Three Online Reactionary Meme Subcultures
September 18, 2023
This report analyses memes propagated among three online socio‐political groups drawn from sample datasets pulled from social media sites often used by adherents of each group. These groups include those connected to the India‐based Hindutva, US‐based neo‐Nazis and those engaging in pro‐Rittenhouse communications in late 2020. The authors chose the groups based on similarities in ...
Linguistic Patterns for Code Word Resilient Hate Speech Identification
September 18, 2023
The permanent transition to online activity has brought with it a surge in hate speech discourse. This has prompted increased calls for automatic detection methods, most of which currently rely on a dictionary of hate speech words, and supervised classification. This approach often falls short when dealing with newer words and phrases produced by online ...
“We are Generation Terror!”: Youth‑on‑youth Radicalisation in Extreme‑right Youth Groups
September 18, 2023
Young people – politicised, active and highly connected – are no longer just passive consumers of online terrorist content by adult groomers but are themselves propaganda creators, group organisers, peer recruiters, extremist financers and terrorist convicts. This process, called “youth‑on‑youth radicalisation”, emphasises the agency that young people have in a digital era in which the ...
From bombing to social media: The role of returning foreign fighters in nurturing terrorism in Asian countries
September 18, 2023
This article aims for revisiting the terrorism studies from different perspective. The terror attacks itself cannot be hundred percent zero but it just fluctuated trend. More specifically, terrorism always adaptive in following trends. While terror attacks still to target innocent civilians, the perpetrators could be closest relatives and neighbors. The way terror attack to reach ...
Governing Online Terrorist Propaganda: A societal security issue
September 18, 2023
There is an increasing threat posed by terrorism in modern day, and with the internet enabling new ways of disseminating online terrorist propaganda, audiences and support for terrorist groups are growing. The complex linkage between society and technology is become ever more critical as the world continues to shift more day-to-day life online, and this ...
An Explorative Study into the Importance of Defining and Classifying Cyber Terrorism in the United Kingdom
September 18, 2023
Terrorism, crime, and war are all familiar notions; however, the way in which these have been altered through cyberspace is not yet fully, nor unanimously, understood through definitions, theories, and approaches. Although the threat level of terrorism in the UK has lowered to moderate, the threat posed by cyber terrorism has nonetheless heightened throughout the ...
Online Radicalisation: Moving beyond a Simple Dichotomy
September 18, 2023
Online radicalisation to terrorism has become a pervasive policy concern over the last decade. However, as a concept it lacks clarity and empirical support. In this article, we add an empirical and theoretical lens to this problem by analysing the trajectories of 231 Islamic State terrorists. We use cluster analyses to create typologies of individuals’ ...
Pretending to be States: The Use of Facebook by Armed Groups in Myanmar
September 18, 2023
Which functions do social media fill for non-state armed groups in countries with internal armed conflict? Building on conflict data, interviews and media monitoring, we have reviewed the use of social media by Myanmar’s nine most powerful armed groups. The first finding is that they act like states, using social media primarily to communicate with ...
Transnational Terrorism and the Internet
September 18, 2023
Does the internet enable the recruitment of transnational terrorists? Using geo-referenced population census data and personnel records from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant—a highly tech-savvy terrorist organization— this paper shows that internet access has facilitated the organization’s recruitment of foreign fighters from Tunisia. The positive association between internet access and Daesh recruitment ...