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Over the past decade, two major phenomena have developed in the digital realm. On the one hand, extremism has grown massively on the Internet, with sprawling online ecosystems hosting a wide range of radical subcultures and communities associated with both ‘stochastic terrorism’ and the ‘mainstreaming of extremism’. On the other hand, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has undergone exponential improvement: from ChatGPT to video deepfakes, from autonomous vehicles to face-recognition CCTV systems, an array of AI technologies has abruptly entered our everyday lives. This report examines ‘AI extremism’, the toxic encounter of these two evolutions – each worrying in its own right. Like past technological progress, AI will indeed be – in fact already is – used in various ways to bolster extremist agendas. Identifying the many opportunities for action that come with a range of AI models, and linking them with different types of extremist actors, we offer a clear overview of the numerous facets of AI extremism. Building on the nascent academic and government literature on the issue as well as on our own empirical and theoretical work, we provide new typologies and concepts to help us organize our understanding of AI extremism, systematically chart its instantiations, and highlight thinking points for stakeholders in countering violent extremism.

This paper combines qualitative and quantitative content analysis to map and analyze the “Incel” worldview shared by members of a misogynistic online community ideologically linked to several recent acts of politically motivated violence, including Alek Minassian’s van attack in Toronto (2018) and Elliot Rodger’s school shooting in Isla Vista (2014). Specifically, the paper analyses how support and motivation for violence results from the particular structure this worldview presents in terms of social categories and causal narratives.

This book offers a comprehensive overview and analysis of the Islamic State’s use of propaganda. Combining a range of different theoretical perspectives from across the social sciences, and using rigorous methods, the authors trace the origins of the Islamic State’s message, laying bare the strategic logic guiding its evolution, examining each of its multi-media components, and showing how these elements work together to radicalize audiences’ worldviews. This volume highlights the challenges that this sort of “full-spectrum propaganda” raises for counter terrorism forces. It is not only a one-stop resource for any analyst of IS and Salafi-jihadism, but also a rich contribution to the study of text and visual propaganda, radicalization and political violence, and international security.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

This paper analyses the impact of a series of mass shootings committed in 2018–2019 by right-wing extremists on 8chan/pol, a prominent far-right online forum. Using computational methods, it offers a detailed examination of how attacks trigger shifts in both forum activity and content. We find that while each shooting is discussed by forum participants, their respective impact varies considerably. We highlight, in particular, a ‘Tarrant effect’: the considerable effect Brenton Tarrant’s attack of two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, had on the forum. Considering the rise in far-right terrorism and the growing and diversifying online far-right ecosystem, such interactive offline-online effects warrant the attention of scholars and security professionals.