Ritualized Opposition In Danish Online Practices Of Extremist Language And Thought
September 18, 2023This article looks at extreme speech practices in Danish weblogs and Facebook comment threads that treat issues of refugees, migration, Islam, and opponents as a cultural war of values and conflict. The article highlights the ritualized ways in which anti-immigrant sentiments are being communicated, received, and responded to. Such recurrent ritualistic communicative patterns include the ...
Caught In The Net: The Impact Of “Extremist” Speech Regulations On Human Rights Content
September 18, 2023Social media companies have long struggled with what to do about extremist content on their platforms. While most companies include provisions about “extremist” content in their community standards, until recently, such content was often vaguely defined, providing policymakers and content moderators a wide berth in determining what to remove, and what to allow. Unfortunately, companies ...
Detection And Classification Of Social Media Based Extremist Affiliations Using Sentiment Analysis Techniques
September 18, 2023Identification and classification of extremist-related tweets is a hot issue. Extremist gangs have been involved in using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter for propagating their ideology and recruitment of individuals. This work aims at proposing a terrorism-related content analysis framework with the focus on classifying tweets into extremist and non-extremist classes. Based on ...
Pulling Back The Curtain: An Examination Of The English Defence League And Their Use Of Facebook
September 18, 2023As social media becomes an integral part of our daily lives, and groups seek to utilize this medium to facilitate activism, understanding the nature of these communications and the impact of the content on the individual user becomes a valid area of interest. When one then considers that extremist and terrorist groups have found social ...
Men Are Scum: Self-Regulation, Hate Speech, And Gender-Based Censorship On Facebook
September 18, 2023Because social media sites are self-regulating, each site has developed its own community standards, which serve as regulatory tools. However, the processes of content moderation are often unclear, subjective, and discriminatory. Drawing from a series of interviews with individuals in the “Men Are Scum” movement, this article describes the experiences of women who have been ...
Terrorists And Cyberspace: The Digital Battleground
September 18, 2023This thesis asks why and how terrorist organizations use the Internet to achieve three strategic goals: 1) the dissemination of propaganda, 2) recruitment and 3) fundraising. It is immediately apparent that the Internet offers a number of advantages, including low cost, global reach, and anonymity. Nonetheless, terrorist organizations vary in their exploitation of these advantages ...
A Dialectical Approach To Online Propaganda: Australia’s United Patriots Front Right Wing Politics And Islamic State
September 18, 2023This article examines how the United Patriots Front (UPF), an Australian far-right organization, has communicated its ideology with reference to right-wing politics in Australia, Western Europe, and the United States, and through allusions to Islamic State. The investigation uses critical discourse and documentary analysis and a framework derived from the theory of Pierre Bourdieu to ...
Beyond The “Big Three”: Alternative Platforms For Online Hate Speech
September 18, 2023In recent years, most international studies on hate speech online have focused on the three platforms traditionally considered the most influential: Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. However, their predominance as the biggest international social networks is no longer uncontested. Other networks are on the rise and young users especially lose interest in the ‘old’ platforms. In ...
Facebook jihad: A case study of recruitment discourses and strategies targeting a Western female
September 18, 2023Recent years has seen a trend towards the increasing specificity of recruitment targets for global jihad. This paper is a case study of the discourses used to recruit a Western female who originally subscribed to an antigovernment, anti-New World Order ideology. Categorising using grounded theory analysis found that female recruiters tapped into the interest of ...
Expressing and Challenging Racist Discourse on Facebook: How Social Media Weaken the “Spiral of Silence” Theory
September 18, 2023This article examines the discursive practices of Facebook users who use the platform to express racist views. We analyzed 51,991 public comments posted to 119 news stories about race, racism, or ethnicity on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News Facebook page. We examined whether users who hold racist viewpoints (the vocal minority) are less likely to ...