Embodying The Nordic Race: Imaginaries Of Viking Heritage In The Online Communications Of The Nordic Resistance Movement
September 18, 2023
Kølvraa’s article focuses on the cultural imaginary of the Scandinavian extreme right by analysing the online presence of the so-called Nordic Resistance Movement. He seeks to show how the cultural imaginaries of this National Socialist organization make use of the Scandinavian Viking heritage in three distinct ways. First, to produce a distinctly Nordic form of ...
Do Internet Searches for Islamist Propaganda Precede or Follow Islamist Terrorist Attacks?
September 18, 2023
Using a Vector-Autoregressive (VAR) model, this paper analyzes the relationship between Islamist terrorist attacks and Internet searches for the phrases such as “join Jihad” or “join ISIS.” It was found that Internet searches for “join Jihad” and “taghut” (Arabic word meaning “to rebel”) preceded the Islamist terrorist attacks by three weeks over the period January ...
Branding A Caliphate In Decline: The Islamic State’s Video Output (2015-2018)
September 18, 2023
Although video releases have been central to the Islamic State’s efforts to represent itself to its audiences, an extensive quantitative and qualitative study of these sources over a longer period of time is still lacking. This paper therefore provides an overview and analysis of the entire corpus of official videos released by the Islamic State ...
Social Media Mechanisms For Right Wing Political Violence In The 21st Century, Discursive Opportunities, Group Dynamics, And Coordination
September 18, 2023
This article maps mechanisms by which online social media activities may contribute to right-wing political violence. High-impact studies on the wave of right-wing and racist violence in the 1990s and early 2000s established that mass media discourse on immigrants and previous violent incidents had a significant influence on the prevalence of radical right violence. This ...
Media Persuasian in the Islamic State
September 18, 2023
Since the declaration of the War on Terror in 2001, militant groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have used the internet to disseminate their message and persuade people to commit violence. While many books have studied their operational strategies and battlefield tactics, Media Persuasion in the Islamic State is the first to analyze the culture ...
The Power Of A Good Story: Narrative Persuasion in Extremist Propaganda and Videos Against Violent Extremism
September 18, 2023
The perceived threat of extremist online propaganda has generated a need for countermeasures applicable to large audiences. The dissemination of videos designed to counter violent extremism (CVE videos) is widely discussed. These videos are often described as “counter-narratives,” implying that narrativity is a crucial factor for their effectiveness. Experimental research testing this assumption is rare and direct ...
ISIS at Its Apogee: The Arabic Discourse on Twitter and What We Can Learn From That About ISIS Support and Foreign Fighters
September 18, 2023
We analyze 26.2 million comments published in Arabic language on Twitter, from July 2014 to January 2015, when Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)’s strength reached its peak and the group was prominently expanding the territorial area under its control. By doing that, we are able to measure the share of support and aversion ...
Detection Of Jihadism In Social Networks Using Big Data
September 18, 2023
Social networks are being used by terrorist organizations to distribute messages with the intention of influencing people and recruiting new members. The research presented in this paper focuses on the analysis of Twitter messages to detect the leaders orchestrating terrorist networks and their followers. A big data architecture is proposed to analyze messages in real ...
Paris And Nice Terrorist Attacks: Exploring Twitter And Web Archives
September 18, 2023
The attacks suffered by France in January and November 2015, and then in the course of 2016, especially the Nice attack, provoked intense online activity both during the events and in the months that followed. The digital traces left by this reactivity and reactions to events gave rise, from the very first days and even ...