Journal Article

The ISIS videos staging the executions of James Foley and Steven Sotloff are usually understood as devices to deter, recruit, and “sow terror.” Left unanswered are questions about how these videos work; to whom they are addressed; and what about them can so continuously bring new audiences into existence. The evident durability of ISIS despite ...

The use of social media to disseminate extreme political content on the web, especially right-wing populist propaganda, is no longer a rarity in today’s life. Recommendation systems of social platforms, which provide personalized filtering of content, can contribute to users forming homogeneous cocoons around themselves. This study investigates YouTube’s recommendations system based on 1,663 German ...

While the last years have seen increased engagement with gaming in relation to extremist attacks, its potential role in facilitating radicalization has received less attention than other factors. This article makes an exploratory contribution to the theoretical foundations of the study of gaming in radicalization research. It is argued that both top-down and bottom up ...

In this article, we conduct a comprehensive study of online antagonistic content related to Jewish identity posted on Twitter between October 2015 and October 2016 by UK-based users. We trained a scalable supervised machine learning classifier to identify antisemitic content to reveal patterns of online antisemitism perpetration at the source. We built statistical models to ...

Experts argue that the internet has provided expanded opportunities for violent extremist groups to propagandize and recruit. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, is an exemplar in that it has heavily invested in an online presence and uses online communities and social media to attract and retain supporters. Does ISIS’s online presence ...

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 ...

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 ...

This paper discusses the use of computer support to analyze IS propaganda. We focus on thematic analysis of the textual content of various types of online propaganda, and investigate two different ways to identify themes in the data. One approach is theory-driven and builds on previous analysis of IS propaganda, and the other approach is data-driven and ...

This paper presents a review of intervention programmes against cyberhate. Over the last decade, the preoccupation over the use of electronic means of communication as a tool to convey hate, racist and xenophobic contents rose tremendously. NGOs, legal professionals, private companies, and civil society have developed interventions but little is known about their impact. For ...

By facilitating the flow of information in society, communications technology (CT; e.g., newspapers, radio, television, the Internet) can help terrorists to (i) spread their message, (ii) recruit followers, and (iii) coordinate among group members. However, CT also facilitates monitoring and arresting terrorists. This article formulates the hypothesis that a society’s level of CT is systematically ...