Journal Article

The far right is notoriously effective in its use of digital media to mobilize people and to build a sense of collective identity around oppositional cultures. Yet, while research has begun to explore far-right groups’ social media hyperlinking activities, relatively little is known about the purposes and communicative functions of this form of communication. By ...

The events surrounding the 2020 U.S. election and the January 6 insurrection have challenged scholarly understanding of concepts like collective action, radicalization, and mobilization. In this article, we argue that online far-right radicalization is better understood as a form of distributed cognition, in which the groups’ online environment incentivizes certain patterns of behavior over others. ...

With Patrick Crusuis’ 2019 attack that killed twenty-two people in El Paso, Texas, discussions of ecofascism were thrust into mainstream news outlets and magazines. In his manifesto, Crusius described himself as an “ecofascist” seeking to challenge the “environmental warfare” of immigration. His choice of target, a Walmart frequented by Mexican immigrants, reflects this ideological connection ...

This paper analyzes the meaning of iconography that constitute memes by reviewing a collection of memes propagated on social media related to the Kyle Rittenhouse shooting of protestors in Wisconsin. The authors collected 355 images from 37,774 tweets, supplemented by images found in Facebook groups, militia forums, and right-wing meme repositories related to Kyle Rittenhouse. ...

This paper examines the need and possibility for developing online resilience-based approaches in response to COVID-19 vaccine conspiracies, often linked to the far right. Examining three datasets collected between December 2020 and April 2021, this paper details conspiracy narratives that have developed around COVID-19 vaccines, with specific focus on understanding the deployment of the idea ...

The rise of QAnon presents researchers with a number of important questions. While emerging literature provides insights into how QAnon exists online, there is a dearth of theoretical engagement with the questions of why it exists, and what conditions brought it into being. This paper seeks to address this gap by contextualizing QAnon as an ...

A counter-intuitive finding emerges from an analysis of Arabic Twitter posts from 2014 to 2015: Twitter participants who are negative toward the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) are also more likely to hold negative views of the United States. This surprising correlation is due to the interpretations of two sets of users. ...

This article offers a descriptive analysis of intelligence operations carried out by the United States and its allies against the presence of jihadist groups on the Internet during the period 2001–2020. In contrast to actions aimed at eliminating the virtual spaces in which terrorists operate, the intelligence operations analysed here are designed to erode terrorists’ ...

This article contributes to the growing field of social media and internet research, focusing on questions of securitization and examining the internet politics of Central Asia with a specific focus on Turkmenistan. The article extends the brief analysis introduced by Tucker and Turaeva (2016) concerning Turkmen nationals joining IS (Islamic State). Here, I have contextualized ...

Without measures of the lethality of terrorist networks, it is very difficult to assess if capturing or killing a terrorist is effective. We present the predictive lethality analysis of terrorist organization () algorithm, which merges machine learning with techniques from graph theory and social network analysis to predict the number of attacks that a terrorist ...