Extreme Right

I am interested in contributing further knowledge regarding the alt-right, white supremacy, and the Internet by exploring the sinister conducting of Zoom-bombing anti-racist events. Here, I will investigate how white supremacy through the Internet can lead to violence, abuse, and fear that “transcends the virtual world to damage real, live humans beings” via Zoom-bombing, an ...

White Supremacist groups have been an active participant in the digital world since its inception. However, as this technology evolved so too did the opportunities it provided to various iterations of far-right political groups and organizations. Though it would be incorrect to say that the evolving realities of the digital world are the central cause ...

This article maps mechanisms by which online social media activities may contribute to right-wing political violence. High-impact studies on the wave of right-wing and racist violence in the 1990s and early 2000s established that mass media discourse on immigrants and previous violent incidents had a significant influence on the prevalence of radical right violence. This ...

This paper investigates the link between social media and hate crime. We show that antirefugee sentiment on Facebook predicts crimes against refugees in otherwise similar municipalities with higher social media usage. To establish causality, we exploit exogenous variation in the timing of major Facebook and internet outages. Consistent with a role for “echo chambers,” we ...

The polarizing tendency of politically leaned social media is usually claimed to be spontaneous, or a by-product of underlying platform algorithms. This contribution revisits both claims by articulating the digital world of social media and rules derived from capitalist accumulation in the post-Fordist age, from a transdisciplinary perspective articulating the human and exact sciences. Behind ...

The counterterrorism and CVE community has long questioned the effectiveness of counterspeech in countering extremism online. While most evaluation of counterspeech rely on limited reach and engagement metrics, this paper explores two models to better measure behavioral change and sentiment analysis. Conducted via partnerships between Facebook and counter-extremism NGOs, the first model uses A/B testing ...

This article begins by outlining four post-WWII strategies of right-wing revolutionary resistance: vanguardism; the cell system; leaderless resistance; and metapolitics. Next, the article argues that metapolitics became a preferred strategy for many right-wing revolutionaries during the 2000s and early 2010s, and proposes three conditions that may help explain this metapolitical turn: limited opportunities for armed ...

Digital platforms enabled the disturbing rise of domestic extremism, culminating with the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Militia groups use social media networks to plan operations, recruit new members, and spread anti-democracy propaganda, a new Digital Citizens Alliance (Digital Citizens) and Coalition for a Safer Web (CSW) investigation has found. ...

This project aims to map right-wing extremism in Victoria through the lens of gender. It begins from the premise that there is an underexplored connection between antifeminist sentiment and far-right extremist sentiment. It does this by focusing on select Victorian-based online groups that have an anti-feminist and far-right profile. The project also works with stakeholders ...

This report aims to provide a first look into Irish far-right activity on the messaging app, Telegram, where the movement is operating both as identifiable groups and influencers, and anonymously-run channels and groups. The report looks at the activity across 34 such Telegram channels through the lens of a series of case studies where content ...