Tracking Online Hate Speech and Identifying Online ‘Raids’ in the UK
September 18, 2023
The Online Civil Courage Initiative’s core partner, ISD, has been tracking both positive and negative responses to terror attacks in the UK this year, to understand how to improve counterspeech in the UK. This report contains advice for NGOs working towards challenging hate speech and extremism online with recommendations/suggestions for how they can respond speedily ...
Radical Right-Wing Extremism in Russian Cyberspace: Proliferation under Conditions of Ban
September 18, 2023
The Internet is harnessed as an ideal means for organization and promotion of protest ideology, which does not require special institutional facilities for maintenance and development. Radical right-wing extremism is reckoned to be among the public sentiments employing this global network. Consequently, Russia is experiencing the tightening of Internet controls. The objective of our study ...
The Fringe Insurgency: Connectivity, Covergence and Mainstreaming of the Extreme Right
September 18, 2023
This report maps the ecosystem of the burgeoning ‘new’ extreme right across Europe and the US, which is characterised by its international outlook, technological sophistication, and overtures to groups outside of the traditional recruitment pool for the extreme-right. This movement is marked by its opportunistic pragmatism, seeing movements which hold seemingly contradictory ideologies share a ...
Terrorist ‘Radicalising Networks’: A Qualitative Case Study on Radical Right Lone-Wolf Terrorism
September 18, 2023
The threat posed by terrorism today is changing rapidly—as have methods of study of this phenomenon, including analysis of radicalisation and the ‘terrorist cycle’. This chapter takes a qualitative approach to one aspect of contemporary terrorism, self-directed (‘lone wolf’) terrorism by right-wing extremists. Predominately plaguing the USA at first, solo actor terrorism by fascist extremists ...
Extreme Far Right Groups’ Use of Social Media: A Focus on Britain First and Reclaim Australia
September 18, 2023
This report contains findings from a study that investigated extreme far right groups’ usages of social media. This was a collaborative project building on an existing partnership between the Departments of Linguistics and Criminology at Swansea University, and on the development of a new partnership with the social media analytics company ‘Blurrt’ (www.blurrt.co.uk). The project ...
Terrorist Use of the Internet by the Numbers: Quantifying Behaviors, Patterns, and Processes
September 18, 2023
Public interest and policy debates surrounding the role of the Internet in terrorist activities is increasing. Criminology has said very little on the matter. By using a unique data set of 223 convicted United Kingdom–based terrorists, this article focuses on how they used the Internet in the commission of their crimes. As most samples of ...
Hate Messages and Violent Extremism in Digital Environments
September 18, 2023
This report presents research carried out within the project (Ku2016/01373/D – Uppdrag till Totalförsvarets forskningsinstitut (FOI) att göra kartläggningar och analyser av våldsbejakande extremistisk propaganda) that has been assigned to the Swedish defence research agency by the Swedish Government. The project will continue until March 2019. The report briefly describes the channels of communication that ...
Cloaked Facebook Pages: Exploring Fake Islamist Propaganda in Social Media
September 18, 2023
This research analyses cloaked Facebook pages that are created to spread political propaganda by cloaking a user profile and imitating the identity of a political opponent in order to spark hateful and aggressive reactions. This inquiry is pursued through a multi-sited online ethnographic case study of Danish Facebook pages disguised as radical Islamist pages, which ...
Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online
September 18, 2023
■ Internet subcultures take advantage of the current media ecosystem to manipulate news frames, set agendas, and propagate ideas. ■ Far-right groups have developed techniques of “attention hacking” to increase the visibility of their ideas through the strategic use of social media, memes, and bots—as well as by targeting journalists, bloggers, and influencers to help ...
Countering Far-Right Recruitment Online: CAPE’s Practitioner Experience
September 18, 2023
Community Action for Preventing Extremism (CAPE) is Australia’s only not-for-profit counter-extremism project focused specifically on preventing a growth in right-wing extremism. By disseminating counter-narratives to extremism through the exitwhitepower.com website and directly engaging with individuals at-risk via social media, CAPE seeks to sow a seed of doubt that will reduce individual’s vulnerability to involvement in ...