Journal Article
Contextual Semantics for Radicalisation Detection on Twitter
September 18, 2023Much research aims to detect online radical content mainly using radicalisation glossaries, i.e., by looking for terms and expressions associated with religion, war, offensive language, etc. However, such crude methods are highly inaccurate towards content that uses radicalisation terminology to simply report on current events, to share harmless religious rhetoric, or even to counter extremism. ...
Dar al-Islam: A Quantitative Analysis of ISIS’s French-Language Magazine
September 18, 2023This study is a content analysis of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)’s French-language magazine Dar al-Islam. The first seven issues of the magazine are quantitatively examined and broken down into the number of articles, images, and terms used as a means of determining how ISIS targets French-speaking individuals. This study find that ISIS ...
Taking North American White Supremacist Groups Seriously: The Scope and Challenge of Hate Speech on the Internet
September 18, 2023This article aims to address two questions: how does hate speech manifest on North American white supremacist websites; and is there a connection between online hate speech and hate crime? Firstly, hate speech is defined and the research methodology upon which the article is based is explained. The ways that ‘hate’ groups utilize the Internet ...
Finding Extremists in Online Social Networks
September 18, 2023Online extremists’ use of social media poses a new form of threat to the general public. These extremists range from cyberbullies to terrorist organizations. Social media providers often suspend the extremists’ accounts in response to user complaints. However, extremist users can simply create new accounts and continue their activities. In this work we present a ...
Invisible Empire of Hate: Gender Differences in the Ku Klux Klan’s Online Justifications for Violence
September 18, 2023This article presents a systematic linguistic approach to mapping gender differences in the formulation and practice of right-wing ideology. We conducted a set of content- and text-analytical analyses on a 52,760 words corpus from a female-only subforum, dubbed LOTIES (Ladies of the Invisible Empire), compared with a matching corpus of 1.793 million words from a ...
To Train Terrorists Onsite or Motivate via the Internet…That is the Question
September 18, 2023This paper investigates an agency model of a terrorist organization in which the training and motivation of recruits can occur onsite, in physical training camps, or at arm’s length through the Internet. In so doing, we develop measures of the effectiveness and efficacy of these recruit training methods. A dividing line for choosing between the ...
Livestreaming the ‘wretched of the Earth’: The Christchurch massacre and the ‘death-bound subject’
September 18, 2023The livestreaming of terror, its co-production through live consumption and the massacre of lives as ‘entertainment’ propelled us into another long abyss of ethical challenges in the case of the xenophobic terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. Livestreaming, as part of the convergence of technologies, enables narration in ‘real’ time, dragging us into ...
Using Internet search data to examine the relationship between anti-Muslim and pro-ISIS sentiment in U.S. counties
September 18, 2023Recent terrorist attacks by first- and second-generation immigrants in the United States and Europe indicate that radicalization may result from the failure of ethnic integration—or the rise of intergroup prejudice in communities where “home-grown” extremists are raised. Yet, these community-level drivers are notoriously difficult to study because public opinion surveys provide biased measures of both ...
Mobilizing extremism online: comparing Australian and Canadian right-wing extremist groups on Facebook
September 18, 2023Right-wing extremist groups harness popular social media platforms to accrue and mobilize followers. In recent years, researchers have examined the various themes and narratives espoused by extremist groups in the United States and Europe, and how these themes and narratives are employed to mobilize their followings on social media. Little, however, is comparatively known about ...
Race, Religion, or Culture? Framing Islam between Racism and Neo-Racism in the Online Network of the French Far Right
September 18, 2023When debates about Islam acquire importance in the public sphere, does the far right adhere to traditional racist arguments, risking marginalization, or does it conform to mainstream values to attain legitimacy in the political system? Focusing on the aftermath of the 2015 terrorist attacks in France, I explore the framing of Islam, discussing how the ...