Australia
Foreign and Familiar: Recruitment Pathways of Young People Engaged with Extremism in Australia
February 20, 2025It has been established by leaders of the Australian national security community, such as the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and the Australian Federal Police, that young people are being increasingly recruited into extremism. To date, few Australian studies have examined this issue using primary source data. This article seeks to understand the conditions which may ...
Reclaim the Beach: How Offline Events Shape Online Interactions and Networks Amongst Those Who Support and Oppose Right-Wing Protest
February 20, 2025In this paper we examine how offline protests attended by members of the Australian far-right shape online interactions. Tweets about the 2019 St Kilda beach rally were collected. Users were manually classified as supporters (n = 104) or opponents of the rally (n = 872). Network analysis demonstrated that interactions between the two groups increased at the time of the ...
The overlap between viewing child sexual abuse material and fringe or radical content online
January 23, 2025Drawing on a survey of 13,302 online Australians, this study examines the characteristics and behaviours of respondents who viewed child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and fringe or radical content online, or both. In the past 12 months, 40.6 percent of respondents had viewed fringe or radical content and 4.5 percent had viewed CSAM. Among respondents ...
Exposure to and sharing of fringe or radical content online
January 23, 2025Using a large, national survey of online Australians, we measured unintentional and intentional exposure to fringe or radical content and groups online. Two in five respondents (40.6%) reported being exposed to material they described as fringe, unorthodox or radical. One-quarter of these respondents (23.2%) accessed the content intentionally. One-third (29.9%) said the content they had ...
Examining extremist language use amongst Australian members of an online far-right forum
November 27, 2024Far-right extremists use the internet to recruit and connect with other radicalised individuals and spread their propaganda online, with them being prolific users of online forums and social media. Such online data can be analysed using linguistic tools to identify markers of radicalisation in social media, forum posts, and other extremist texts. Few studies have ...
Nazis at the salad bar: The National Workers’ Alliance and mixed, unclear, and unstable ideology
October 9, 2024VOX-Pol Blog post. ...
Organize and Fight (Online): Assessing the Discursive Extremism of Anti-Lockdown Groups in Australia
October 2, 2024Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-lockdown movements sparked concerns about online extremism escalating into real-world violence. This study takes the Australian anti-lockdown movement to explore extremist discourse in Australia, as it contained several, overlapping and interacting extremisms. This study explores the labelling of these protests as extreme and examines the interplay between individuals, ...
Far-Right ‘Reactions’: a comparison of Australian and Canadian far-right extremist groups on Facebook
September 18, 2023Little is known about which features of Facebook’s interface appeal to users of far-right extremist groups, how such features may influence a user’s interpretation of far-right extremist themes and narratives, and how this is being experienced across various nations. This paper looks at why certain ‘Reactions’ appealed to users in Australian and Canadian far-right groups ...