Multi-Ideology, Multiclass Online Extremism Dataset, and Its Evaluation Using Machine Learning
October 29, 2024
Social media platforms play a key role in fostering the outreach of extremism by influencing the views, opinions, and perceptions of people. These platforms are increasingly exploited by extremist elements for spreading propaganda, radicalizing, and recruiting youth. Hence, research on extremism detection on social media platforms is essential to curb its influence and ill effects. ...
The Gift of Gab: A Netnographic Examination of the Community Building Mechanisms in Far-Right Online Space
October 29, 2024
Major social media platforms have recently taken a more proactive stand against harmful far-right content and pandemic-related disinformation on their sites. However, these actions have catalysed the growth of fringe online social networks for participants seeking right-wing content, safe havens, and unhindered communication channels. To better understand these isolated systems of online activity and their ...
The Gab Project: The Methodological, Epistemological, and Legal Challenges of Studying the Platformized Far Right
August 28, 2024
In this article we describe our five-year research project on the notorious radical free speech service and fringe platform Gab. During these years we scraped an entire platform, prepared it into a dataset for analysis, and opened it up to a broader community of students and researchers. Each of these projects provides us not just ...
‘Welcome to #GabFam’: Far-right virtual community on Gab
September 18, 2023
With large social media platforms coming under increasing pressure to deplatform far-right users, the Alternative Technology movement (Alt-Tech) emerged as a new digital support infrastructure for the far right. We conduct a qualitative analysis of the prominent Alt-Tech platform Gab, a social networking service primarily modelled on Twitter, to assess the far-right virtual community on ...