Cross-national level report on digital sociability and drivers of self-radicalisation in Europe
September 18, 2023
In this report, we present an empirical cross-national study of supporters of right-wing extremists’ (RWE) and Islamist extremists’ (ISE) activities and interactions on Twitter. The study is based on ethnographic and automatic text and network analyses of data from Belgian, British, Dutch, French, German, Greek and Norwegian female and male Twitter accounts. ...
Mining ideological discourse on Twitter: The case of extremism in Arabic
September 18, 2023
Extremism has been a problematic term to define and suggests different and opposing meanings. This study explores how Twitter users conceptualize extremism in Arabic and express their opinions/arguments to construct the term. A corpus of tweets was collected from Twitter API using the word ‘تطرف أو متطرف’ in Arabic for extremist/extremism. A topic modeling algorithm ...
A “Europe des Nations”: far right imaginative geographies and the politicization of cultural crisis on Twitter in Western Europe
September 18, 2023
Contestation over European integration has been widely studied in the rhetoric of parties, leaders, and movements on the far right in a variety of media. Focusing on Twitter use by far right actors in Western Europe, we apply corpus-aided discourse analysis to explore how imaginative geographies are used to politicize Europe among their digital publics. ...
Uniting the far right: how the far-right extremist, New Right, and populist frames overlap on Twitter – a German case study
September 18, 2023
Recent elections in Europe have demonstrated a steady rise in the success of right-wing populist parties. While advancing an anti-immigration agenda, these parties have been adamant to distance themselves from ‘right-wing extremism’. This article analyses a sample of tweets collected from the Twitter accounts of the German AfD, Identitarian Movement and the Autonomous Nationalists by ...
Digitale Worte – Analoge Taten: Eine fallgestützte Analyse nach außen und nach innen kommunizierter Ideologie einer rechtsextremen Gruppierung
September 18, 2023
In diesem Beitrag werden auf Basis von staatsanwaltschaftlichen Verfahrensakten, Daten der Programmierschnittstelle von Twitter (API) und frei zugänglichen Online-Inhalten Konstitutions- und Kommunikationsdynamiken einer rechtsextremistischen Gruppierung analysiert, von der mehrere Mitglieder 2014 wegen der Bildung einer kriminellen Vereinigung verurteilt wurden. Es wird rekonstruiert und analysiert, wie die jungen Erwachsenen über verschiedene Kommunikationskanäle innerhalb ihrer Gruppe und ...
Mainstreaming white supremacy: a twitter analysis of the American ‘Alt-Right’
September 18, 2023
In this paper, I analyze how the so called ‘alt-right’ is using Twitter to mainstream its politics. Understanding alt-right mainstreaming is important because the movement has embraced a Gramscian view of politics that believes cultural change (e.g. normalizing unpopular ideas) must precede institutional change (e.g. fielding candidates for office). To conduct my analysis I created ...
Hate Speech Detection on Twitter: Feature Engineering v.s. Feature Selection
September 18, 2023
The increasing presence of hate speech on social media has drawn significant investment from governments, companies, and empirical research. Existing methods typically use a supervised text classification approach that depends on carefully engineered features. However, it is unclear if these features contribute equally to the performance of such methods. We conduct a feature selection analysis ...
Deep Learning for Hate Speech Detection in Tweets
September 18, 2023
Hate speech detection on Twitter is critical for applications like controversial event extraction, building AI chatterbots, content recommendation, and sentiment analysis. We define this task as being able to classify a tweet as racist, sexist or neither. The complexity of the natural language constructs makes this task very challenging. We perform extensive experiments with multiple ...
Automatic Identification and Classification of Misogynistic Language on Twitter
September 18, 2023
Hate speech may take different forms in online social media. Most of the investigations in the literature are focused on detecting abusive language in discussions about ethnicity, religion, gender identity and sexual orientation. In this paper, we address the problem of automatic detection and categorization of misogynous language in online social media. The main contribution ...
Detecting Hate Speech on Twitter Using a Convolution-GRU Based Deep Neural Network
September 18, 2023
In recent years, the increasing propagation of hate speech on social media and the urgent need for effective counter-measures have drawn significant investment from governments, companies, and empirical research. Despite a large number of emerging scientific studies to address the problem, a major limitation of existing work is the lack of comparative evaluations, which makes ...