Online Library

This article represents an initial exploration of the content and posting strategies of the current wave of racist flyer drops in the US, focusing specifically on a dataset of all documented flyers posted in 2018. The dataset was generated by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and augmented by the authors. The dataset is unique among open sources and includes a large number of incidents which were not reported in the media. The article consists of three parts. The first documents and briefly discusses the groups engaged in racist flyer development and drops. The second describes and characterises the text and image content of the flyers. The final section uses open sources and leaked material to describe the process by which flyer drops are instigated, planned and documented.

This chapter focuses on the instructional content, both text and images, published in 26 issues of three jihadi magazines: Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s Inspire, Inspire’s forerunner Jihad Recollections, and Somali Al-Shabab’s Gaidi M’taani. Instruction was found to be a core component of Inspire as distinct from the varying types and levels of instruction appearing in Jihad Recollections and Gaidi M’taani. Noticeable too was that the text and images composing bomb-making instructional guides were not only the commonest, but also the most detailed types of guides contained in Inspire, with both a high number of images and lengthy supporting text. A clear finding is thus that the purpose of AQAP’s Inspire was not just to inspire readers, in the sense of infusing them with some thought or feeling, but also to supply them with instructions on how these thoughts or feelings could be violently actuated.

This report treats developments in the violent extremist and terrorist online scene(s) in the 12-month period from 1 December 2020 to 30 November 2021. It accomplishes this by surveying, describing, and integrating the findings of relevant articles and reports produced by academics, thinktanks, civil society, and governmental organisations; high quality media coverage; and the first hand experience and primary research of the authors.
This report treats developments in the violent extremist and terrorist online scene(s) in the 12-month period from 1 December 2020 to 30 November 2021. It accomplishes this by surveying, describing, and integrating the findings of relevant articles and reports produced by academics, thinktanks, civil society, and governmental organisations; high quality media coverage; and the firsthand experience and primary research of the authors.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

Considerable attention has been paid by researchers to social media platforms, especially the ‘big companies’, and increasingly also messaging applications, and how effectively they moderate extremist and terrorist content on their services. Much less attention has yet been paid to if and how infrastructure and service providers, further down ‘the tech stack’, deal with extremism and terrorism. Content Delivery Networks (CDN) such as Cloudflare play an underestimated role in moderating the presence of extremist and terrorist content online as it is impossible for these websites to operate without DDoS protection. This is evidenced by the takedown of a wide range websites such as The Daily Stormer, 8chan, a variety of Taliban websites and more recently the organised harassment site Kiwifarms following refusal of service by Cloudflare. However, it is unclear whether there is any formal process of content review conducted by the company when it decides to refuse services. This article aims to first provide an analysis of what extremist and terrorist websites make use of Cloudflare’s services as well as other CDNs, and how many of them have been subject to takedown following refusal of service. Following this the article analyses CDNs’ terms of service and how current and upcoming internet regulation applies to these CDNs.