The online game Minecraft, owned by Microsoft, has amassed 141 million active users since it was launched in 2011. It is used in school communities, among friend groups and even has been employed by the U.N. Despite its ubiquity as an online space, little has been reported on how hate and harassment manifest in Minecraft, ...

This research aims to compile data and information that will contribute to understanding the online radicalization phenomenon through translation. There are many studies on using the internet and propaganda in a terrorism context. However, only a handful studied the correlation between translation and terrorism propaganda, especially in Indonesia. There was little discussion on the role ...

This article describes and discusses a comparative semiotic analysis of online text collected from eight extreme right websites and four violent jihadi groups’ online magazines. The two datasets, which comprise just over 1 million words each, were analyzed using LIWC software. The core issues explored were the shared and different linguistic patterns used among extreme ...

The mass shooting in and around the Tops grocery store in Buffalo, New York on May 14, 2022 that claimed the lives of ten individuals and injured three others was all the more horrific because of the white supremacist ideological motivation that fueled it and the shooter’s meticulous planning. The disturbing reality is that this ...

Incels – a term that stands for “involuntary celibates”—is a subculture of men connected by their inability to obtain romantic and sexual relationships. As a group known for real-world violent attacks, understanding the drivers of online membership offers valuable insight into these vulnerable men. The current study used inductive qualitative analysis of over 8,000 posts ...

This study explores how terrorists use financial technologies in their plots. Using a database of 231 US-based Islamic State actors, it analyses how they move money and make purchases, as well as whether the use of technology affects success. Fundamentally, terrorists opt for simplicity; there is little evidence of sophisticated financial plots. Terrorists tend to use ...

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 ...