Online Library

Online terrorism has been subject to significant change over the past twenty years. An appreciation of the roles of the Internet in terrorism was, like the Web itself, still nascent at the time of 9/11. An early focus on cyberterrorism was nevertheless, even then, giving way to a realisation that the Internet’s affordances were already altering the extremism and terrorism landscape. Some of the earliest work in this area was on extremist and terrorist websites and their purposes.

Extremist and terrorist websites never really went away, they were just overlooked for a decade by researchers and others due to a not unwarranted narrowing of focus to social media platforms and, latterly, messaging applications and adjacent online spaces.

While there is less reliance on websites by extremists and terrorists than there once was, websites remain an important component of the contemporary online extremist and terrorist ecosystem(s) and could re-emerge more strongly with accelerated disruption of extremist and terrorist content and accounts by social media platforms and adjacent services unless providers further down ‘the tech stack’ take more concerted action.

VOX-Pol Guest Lecture Series, Autumn 2022

Speaker: Prof Maura Conway

Title: Online extremism and terrorism research: Where we’ve been, where we’re going

Outline: As part of the inaugural guest lecture for the 2022 series, Prof Maura Conway discusses “Online extremism and terrorism research: Where we’ve been, where we’re going”. The lecture is preceded by an introduction by VOX-Pol co-ordinator Prof Stuart Macdonald and is followed by a Q&A moderated by Seán Looney.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

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.

The seven articles in this special issue were selected from those delivered at a series of workshops undertaken by the European Commission H2020-funded Building Resilience Against Violent Extremism (BRaVE) Project in 2020–2021. Understanding polarization and (violent) extremism as distinct, interlinked, phenomena, the collected articles ask how online platforms can be mobilised to disrupt and reframe ideologies underpinning polarising and extremist messaging. To what extent can social media platforms serve as critical resources that contribute to building pro-social resilience? And, how can we build on what has been effective so far in terms of building online resilience, including what else might social media platforms and their users do to enhance what has already been found to be effective?

This research employs the concept of social capital to compare the efforts that a range of tech companies have claimed to take to counter polarization and extremism and build resilience on their platforms. The dataset on which our analysis is based is made-up of a purposive sample of official blog posts from three ‘older’ (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) and three ‘newer’ (i.e., TikTok, Discord, and Telegram) technology platforms. The selected posts focused on companies’ efforts to make their platform safer, build community resilience, counter violent extremism and/or polarization, or mentioned related topics such as countering hate organizations, radicalization, or misinformation. Revealed were seven themes incorporating, to a greater or lesser extent, the three main types of social capital (i.e., bonding, bridging and linking). These themes were granting user powers, strengthening existing communities, provision of information and education, building community, enhancing user rights, keeping users safe, and building trust and relationships with users. Analysis of these showed that while creation of all three types of social capital was apparent, similar to previous studies, bridging capital dominated here too; while there were some discrepancies between social capital generating activities and their framings on ‘older’ versus ‘newer’ platforms, other factors, including platform size and company values are likely to be equally or more important; and, finally, that companies attempts at generating online social capital can have negative as well as positive impacts with regard to countering polarization and extremism.