A Web of Extremism: How Anti-Government Extremists Survive Online Censorship
April 29, 2025This thesis explores how extremism manages to survive in moderated online spaces. This work follows the attempts of the Instagram platform to minimize the presence of the right-wing extremist groups, specifically the Boogaloo movement, as a means of understanding how such groups survive and proselytize in the face of censorship. Addressing this question is done ...
Behind Blue Skies: A Multimodal Automated Content Analysis of Islamic Extremist Propaganda on Instagram
April 28, 2025Social media platforms, such as Instagram, are regularly misused for spreading covert (Islamic) extremist propaganda. Affect and emotion are central tools used in extremist propaganda, but there is little research into the combined employment of different social media elements, such as hashtags, visuals, and texts, in the context of propaganda. This study contributes to closing ...
Far-right social media communication in the light of technology affordances: a systematic literature review
December 3, 2024Most analyses of far-right communication on social media focus on one specific platform, while findings are generalized. In this study, I argue that the far right’s use of social media depends on technology affordances – the linkage between platform design and usage – and, thus, might not always be generalizable. After discussing six affordances – ...
From Bad to Worse: Auto-generating & Autocompleting Hate
October 29, 2024Do social media and search companies exacerbate antisemitism and hate through their own design and system functions? In this joint study by the ADL Center for Technology and Society (CTS) and Tech Transparency Project (TTP), we investigated search functions on both social media platforms and Google. Our results show how these companies’ own tools–such as ...
From Bad to Worse: Algorithmic Amplification of Antisemitism and Extremism
October 29, 2024Do social media companies exacerbate antisemitism and hate through their own recommendation and amplification tools? We investigated how four of the biggest social media platforms treated users who searched for or engaged with content related to anti-Jewish tropes, conspiracy theories, and other topics. Three of them–Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter1 (now known as X after a ...
ISIS and the Militant Jihad on Instagram, Part I: Identifying Supporters
August 16, 2024VOX-Pol Blog post. ...
ISIS and the Militant Jihad on Instagram, Part II: Terrorist Propagandizing and Recruitment Strategies
August 16, 2024VOX-Pol Blog post. ...
ISIS and the Militant Jihad on Instagram, Part III: Counter-Narrative Strategies
August 8, 2024VOX-Pol Blog Post. ...
Escape Routes: How far-right actors circumvent the Network Enforcement Act
September 18, 2023For this study, the online milieu of radical right-wing and extreme right-wing actors was investigated with regard to linking to alternative platforms. The aim of the analysis was to make the cosmos of online platforms used by right-wing extremist and radical right-wing actors accessible to readers and researchers. As established social media such as Facebook, ...