Online Library

This report contains findings from a study that investigated extreme far right groups’
usages of social media. This was a collaborative project building on an existing
partnership between the Departments of Linguistics and Criminology at Swansea
University, and on the development of a new partnership with the social media
analytics company ‘Blurrt’ (www.blurrt.co.uk). The project was funded by the
CHERISH-DE multidisciplinary research centre at Swansea University
(http://www.cherish-de.uk/) and the School of Arts & Humanities at Edith Cowan
University (https://www.ecu.edu.au/schools/arts-and-humanities).
This report provides an overview of the aims, methodology and key findings of this
project. The project was conducted between January and August 2017. It drew upon
data from two social media platforms (Facebook and Twitter), collected over a 10-
week period (January-April 2017), and concerned two extreme far right groups:
Britain First and Reclaim Australia. Further publications will be appearing in due
course and those interested in hearing more about the project should contact the
report’s authors (details on p.23).

Terrorist use of the Internet has become a focus of media, policy, and scholarly attention in recent years. Terrorists use the Internet in a variety of ways, the most important being for propaganda purposes and operations-related content, but it is also potentially a means or target of attack. This book presents revised versions of a selection of papers delivered at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) on ‘Terrorists’ Use of the Internet’ held in Dublin, Ireland in June 2016. One aim of the workshop was to nurture dialogue between members of the academic, policy and practitioner communities, so the 60 delegates from 13 countries who attended the workshop included representatives from each of these. The participants encompassed a wide range of expertise (including engineering, computer science, law, criminology, political science, international relations, history, and linguistics) and the chapters contained herein reflect these diverse professional and disciplinary backgrounds. The workshop also aimed to address the convergence of threats. Following an introduction which provides an overview of the various ways in which terrorists use the Internet, the book’s remaining 25 chapters are grouped into 5 sections on cyber terrorism and critical infrastructure protection; cyber-enabled terrorist financing; jihadi online propaganda; online counterterrorism; and innovative approaches and responses. The book will be of interest to all those who need to maintain an awareness of the ways in which terrorists use the Internet and require an insight into how the threats posed by this use can be countered.

The focus of this paper is on the extremist group Britain First. As such, it does not explore online terrorist activity but rather examines how a group regarded as extremist is subject to online sanctions. The removal of the extremist group Britain First from Facebook in March 2018 successfully disrupted the group’s online activity, leading them to have to start anew on Gab, a different and considerably smaller social media platform. The removal also resulted in the group having to seek new online followers from a much smaller, less diverse recruitment pool. This paper demonstrates the further impact of the group’s platform migration on their online strategy – particularly on their choice of images and the engagement levels generated through them. The paper puts forward a number of key recommendations, most importantly that social-media companies should continue to censor and remove hateful content.