Journal Article

In the wake of the international refugee crisis, racist attitudes are becoming more publicly evident across the European Union. Propelled by the attacks in Köln on New Year’s Eve 2015 and harsher public sentiments on immigration, vigilante gangs have emerged in various European cities. These gangs mobilize through social media networks and claim to protect ...

This article explores how the notion of “extreme speech” can advocate a context-specific, practice-oriented approach to alt-right digital culture while also foregrounding its imbrication in larger histories of racial formation. Designating the popular White-nationalist hashtag #whitegenocide as an alt-right structure of feeling, it uses a data-critical discourse on “digital traces” to support a form of ...

In the past decade, people associated with what is known as the alt-right have employed a strategy similar to that of progressive, antiracist satirists to advance a decidedly white supremacist, anti-Semitic, misogynist, and deadly serious agenda. As this article documents, the alt-right weaponizes irony to attract and radicalize potential supporters, challenge progressive ideologies and institutions, ...

The process of adjusting to a new country may carry important stressors for refugees. In the light of neoliberal policies, refugees are expected to become resilient in a local arrival infrastructure and perform a specific subjectivity based on gratefulness, adaptability, and digital sensitivity to successfully integrate. Drawing on a qualitative, in-depth case study with Syrians ...

This article presents the results of a case study of the online community Russian Nationalism, one of the most popular Russian nationalists’ online communities on VKontakte in 2012–2016. The article aims to find out where network leaders and common members of nationalist online groups closed on the Russian Internet go and in which thematic communities ...

Propaganda is a common element in many, if not all, terrorist incidents. Objectives are usually to instil fear in the target population but may also include winning approval from associates and inspiring new adherents. The advent of social media has greatly expanded opportunities for achieving these objectives. The attacks on worshipers in two mosques in ...

As the debate on whether Hamas should be designated a terrorist organization intensifies across Europe and North America, policymakers and practitioners seek to identify the core principles that unify the group and its ideology. This paper contributes to this discussion by examining how Hamas uses Twitter to frame its narrative to English-speakers around the world. ...

Who is likely to view materials online maligning groups based on race, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, political views, immigration status, or religion? We use an online survey (N = 1034) of youth and young adults recruited from a demographically balanced sample of Americans to address this question. By studying demographic characteristics and online habits ...

We present a machine learning framework that leverages a mixture of metadata, network, and temporal features to detect extremist users, and predict content adopters and interaction reciprocity in social media. We exploit a unique dataset containing millions of tweets generated by more than 25 thousand users who have been manually identified, reported, and suspended by ...

There can be few greater fears for a parent than their child being contacted by a stranger, indoctrinated with an extreme ideology, and encouraged to join a violent movement, all while accessing the internet from their bedroom. Children’s smartphones and computers may be portals to the most dangerous places on earth. The use of the ...