Social Media

TikTok is a pivotal platform for political communication, especially among younger users. This study examines how the German rightwing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) used TikTok to disseminate populist messages and engage users during the 2024 European elections. By analyzing videos posted by AfD politicians in the three months leading up to the elections, ...

This paper contributes to platform-comparative research through a case study of Twitter/X, Telegram, and Gettr in the context of German far-right social movements. It introduces the conceptual framework of platform opportunity structures to examine how platforms enable or constrain far-right mobilization. Using community analysis of sharing networks among the same pool of far-right social movement actors, the ...

Social media platforms like Reddit, YouTube, and Instagram amplify rapid dissemination of negative sentiment, potentially causing harm and fostering extremist discourse. This paper addresses the NLP challenge of predicting sudden spikes in negative sentiment by fine-tuning multilingual transformer models. We present a structured pipeline emphasizing linguistic feature extraction and temporal modeling. Our experimental results, obtained ...

Although the misuse of new technologies by terrorist actors has been a major concern for some time, the capabilities offered by (and the availability of) a range of new and emerging technologies – including gaming platforms, unmanned aerial systems (UAS), artificial intelligence (AI) and 3D-printed weapons – have heightened these fears even further. An analysis ...

Patriotic Alternative (PA) is one of Britain’s largest fascist organizations. PA members have served prison sentences for terrorism and hate crime offenses and MPs have called for the organization to be proscribed under counter-terrorism legislation. This article employs a cultural and narrative criminological approach to analyze PA activists’ accounts of their political journeys into the ...

People use social media platforms to chat, search, and share information, express their opinions, and connect with others. But these platforms also facilitate the posting of divisive, harmful, and hateful messages, targeting groups and individuals, based on their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or political views.Hate content is not only a problem on the Internet, ...

This article explores how cyberspace and social media are being used as instruments for the growth of extremist discourse in Malaysia—83% of militant detainees charged under anti-terrorism laws relied on social media platforms to access materials and establish virtual networking with likeminded individuals. The internet also provides a conducive environment for the incubation and growth ...

This paper critically examines the role of social media algorithms in amplifying terrorist recruitment efforts in Northern Nigeria. It argues that while platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter) are designed to optimize user engagement, their algorithmic logic often favors sensational and polarizing content including extremist propaganda. Terrorist groups such as Boko Haram ...

Gore-related websites enable the hosting and sharing of illegal videos, including those produced by proscribed terrorist entities. The websites are numerous, free to access, provide no user or child safety features, and have seen a growth in visitor numbers in recent years due to ongoing conflicts. Most gore-related websites offer download and social media share ...

Given that terrorism is omnipresent on social media, it is imperative to study how seeing terror content online is related to individuals’ attitudes, behaviors, and emotions. This study investigates how exposure to terrorism on social media associates with terror-related online self-disclosure and how self-disclosure, in turn, relates to fear of terrorism. A quota-based survey of ...