Hate speech and toxic communication online is on the rise. Responses to this issue tend to offer technical (automated) or non-technical (human content moderation) solutions, or see hate speech as a natural product of hateful people. In contrast, this article begins by recognizing platforms as designed environments that support particular practices while discouraging others. In ...

The European Union (EU) is an influential voice in the global debate on regulation of online speech. For that reason, two upcoming regulatory regimes might – in addition to shaping EU digital policy – create global precedents for how to regulate both online speech generally and terrorist content specifically. ...

Algorithms and especially recommendation algorithms play an important role online, most notably on YouTube. Yet, little is known about the network communities that these algorithms form. We analyzed the channel recommendations on YouTube to map the communities that the social network is creating through its algorithms and to test the network for homophily, that is, ...

Online content regulation in Turkey is characterised by extensive removal of material that has resulted in a large number of Turkish and international websites being blocked in recent years. Further, the Turkish government recently introduced a Social Media Bill, implementing a wide range of new regulations and steep penalties for social media companies, which critics ...

This paper combines corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis methodologies in order to investigate the discourses and cyber activism of the British right-wing nationalist party, Britain First. A study of a corpus of texts produced by elite members of the group reveals a racist, xenophobic stance which constructs Islam and Muslims as the radical, dangerous ...

Social media platforms have profoundly transformed cultural production, in part by restructuring the terms by which culture is distributed and paid for. In this article, we examine the YouTube Partner Program and the controversies around the “demonetization” of videos, to understand these arrangements and what happens when they shift beneath creators’ feet. We use the ...

The present paper contributes to the research on the activities of far-right actors on social media by examining the interconnections between far-right actors and groups on Telegram platform using network analysis. The far-right network observed on Telegram is highly decentralized, similarly to the far-right networks found on other social media platforms. The network is divided ...

In diesem Beitrag werden auf Basis von staatsanwaltschaftlichen Verfahrensakten, Daten der Programmierschnittstelle von Twitter (API) und frei zugänglichen Online-Inhalten Konstitutions- und Kommunikationsdynamiken einer rechtsextremistischen Gruppierung analysiert, von der mehrere Mitglieder 2014 wegen der Bildung einer kriminellen Vereinigung verurteilt wurden. Es wird rekonstruiert und analysiert, wie die jungen Erwachsenen über verschiedene Kommunikationskanäle innerhalb ihrer Gruppe und ...

In recent years, there has been an intensification of international extremist violence linked in varying degrees to Internet-facilitated radicalisation. This has related to, among other things, a growth in prevalence of politically violent actors, including far-right and jihadist collectives. Extreme political polarisation, sometimes termed the ‘hyper-tribalism’ of those with violent or extreme views, is to ...

This chapter illustrates that online and offline measures to counter violent extremism in Australia have targeted jihadism over other forms of extremism. With attention to the open and intensifying state of far-right extremism in Australia, it advocates for increased attention to this situation. It contends that, given the recursive nature of online extremism and its ...