Jihadi Culture on the World Wide Web
September 18, 2023
This volume examines “jihadi” content on the Internet by drawing on both Arabic and English primary source materials. After examining this content as digital media, the work looks at how it is productively consumed by online communities, including how “jihadi” individuals construct themselves online and how jihadism is practiced and represented as an online activity. ...
The Caliphate Is Not a Tweet Away: The Social Media Experience of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb
September 18, 2023
This article offers a descriptive analysis of the propaganda activities of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb on Internet social media. It examines the group’s propaganda actions from its creation in 1998 until the end of 2015 and argues that the use of social media, Twitter in particular, has failed to offer any real remedy ...
The Brussels Attacks: Critical Online Communications
September 18, 2023
We present a machine learning framework that leverages a mixture of metadata, network, and temporal features to detect extremist users, and predict content adopters and interaction reciprocity in social media. We exploit a unique dataset containing millions of tweets generated by more than 25 thousand users who have been manually identified, reported, and suspended by ...
The Call to Jihad: Charismatic Preachers and the Internet
September 18, 2023
A range of psychological, social, and environmental factors render some individuals more susceptible to militant Islam than others. Research also suggests that there are certain “triggers,” which help to explain why it is that only some individuals exposed to the same societal structural influences turn to violence. This article seeks to contribute to future empirical ...
The Taliban’s Virtual Emirate: The Culture and Psychology of an Online Militant Community
September 18, 2023
Applying cutting-edge psychiatric theories to an analysis of online Taliban literature in four languages, Neil Krishan Aggarwal constructs a game-changing narrative of the organization’s broad appeal and worldview. Aggarwal focuses on the Taliban’s creation of culture, evoking religion in Arabic and English writings, nationalism in Dari sources, and regionalism in Urdu texts. The group also ...
Political Radicalization on the Internet: Extremist Content, Government Control, and the Power of Victim and Jihad Videos
September 18, 2023
The role of the internet in radicalizing individuals to extremist action is much discussed but remains conceptually and empirically unclear. Here we consider right-wing and jihadist use of the Internet – who posts what and where. We focus on extremist content related to radicalization to violent action, and argue that victim videos and jihad videos ...
Radicalization on the Internet?
September 18, 2023
The spectre of a retrograde, puritanical and belligerent ideology may seem anachronistic in the twenty-first century. However, Jihadism (as opposed to the classical reified conception of Jihad) is a thoroughly modern phenomenon. The Internet, that most contemporary of media, is increasingly its medium of choice: Jihadist websites, forums and blogs flourish. Prominent Jihadist ideologues like ...
The Internet in Indonesia: Development and Impact of Radical Websites
September 18, 2023
The Internet has become a crucial part of modern society’s life due to its ability to facilitate communication and structure contemporary society. Indonesia has not been left out of this global phenomenon. The Internet came to Indonesia in 1983 and its usage has continued to expand ever since, especially within institutions of learning and in ...
The Janus Face of New Media Propaganda: The Case of Patani Neojihadist YouTube Warfare and Its Islamophobic Effect on Cyber-Actors
September 18, 2023
Surfing on the Internet 2.0 revolution, Patani 2.0 has allowed Patani neojihadist militants to access new competitive spaces and create their own imagined online community by penetrating new realms of the Internet. This article discusses the use of new media militant propaganda by Patani militants and how it is Janus faced. It further examines how ...
An Exploratory, Dynamic Application of Social Network Analysis for Modelling the Development of Islamist Terror‐Cells in the West
September 18, 2023
The present paper represents an exploratory, dynamic and qualitative application of Social Network Analysis (SNA) for modelling the development of Islamist terror cells in the West. Two well‐known case studies are systematically re‐examined using this methodology as a supporting framework for interpreting the sequence of group development from a social psychological perspective. By drawing attention ...