Analyzing Terror Campaigns on the Internet: Technical Sophistication, Content Richness, and Web Interactivity
September 18, 2023
Terrorists and extremists are increasingly utilizing Internet technology to enhance their ability to influence the outside world. Due to the lack of multi-lingual and multimedia terrorist/extremist collections and advanced analytical methodologies, our empirical understanding of their Internet usage is still very limited. To address this research gap, we explore an integrated approach for identifying and ...
Cyberculture and the Endurance of White Power Activism
September 18, 2023
Drawing from ethnographic and documentary data, this article examines the character of the social spaces that white power movement (WPM) activists create on the Internet and the linkages to their real world activism. Specifically, we explain how white power activists use cyberspace as a free space to create and sustain movement culture and coordinate collective ...
Framing the Troubles Online: Northern Irish groups and website strategy
September 18, 2023
Can the Internet really make a difference for groups who wish to either support or challenge a peace process? This book explores the ways in which civil and uncivil groups in Northern Ireland use the Internet during a period of conflict transformation, with a particular emphasis on their framing of their positions in respect of ...
Jihadism Online: A Study of How al-Qaida and Radical Islamist Groups Use the Internet for Terrorist Purposes
September 18, 2023
The Internet is of major importance to the global jihadist movement today. It facilitates ideological cohesion and network-building within a geographically scattered movement, and all levels of the jihadist network are present on the Internet. The jihadist websites differ enormously in nature and are run relatively independently of each other. However, many sites are inter-related ...
Interpersonal Trust on Jihadi Internet Forums
September 18, 2023
This chapter explores the effects of the trust problem on jihadi internet discussion forums. The scarcity of non-verbal cues in digital communication facilitates deceptive mimicry, which undermines the inter- personal trust required for sensitive transactions. Open-source data from Arabic-language jihadi forums between 2006 and 2011 indicate that distrust there was high and direct recruitment rare. ...
The Women of Stormfront: An Examination of White Nationalist Discussion Threads on the Internet
September 18, 2023
Although a plethora of literature exists on hate or extremist group activity, the role of racist women remains an unexplored area. The current study sought to explore one method of communication for racist women, the Internet. The researchers conducted a content analysis on 227 discussion threads provided on one of the oldest extremist websites on ...
The Internet Rhetoric of the Ku Klux Klan: A Case Study in Web Site Community Building Run Amok
September 18, 2023
Many scholars have praised the Internet as a locale where positive community building takes place. Conversely,this study examines 23 KKK web sites as an exemplar of how groups may engage in community building of a most egregious sort. Through appeals to white masculinity and, on some web sites, segmented appeals to women and to youth ...
Sub-Saharan African Terrorist Groups’ Use of the Internet
September 18, 2023
This article presents the results of a study which measured the web presence of terrorist groups active in Sub Saharan Africa. It also explores the relationship between web technology availability and adoption by terrorist groups and looks at how differentiating between web publishing technologies used by terrorist groups can further develop the study of terrorist ...