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Although it is understudied relative to other social media platforms, YouTube is arguably the largest and most engaging online media consumption platform in the world. Recently, YouTube’s outsize influence has sparked concerns that its recommendation algorithm systematically directs users to radical right-wing content. Here we investigate these concerns with large scale longitudinal data of individuals’ browsing behavior spanning January 2016 through December 2019. Consistent with previous work, we find that political news content accounts for a relatively small fraction (11%) of consumption on YouTube, and is dominated by mainstream and largely centrist sources. However, we also find evidence for a small but growing “echo chamber” of far-right content consumption. Users in this community show higher engagement and greater “stickiness” than users who consume any other category of content. Moreover, YouTube accounts for an increasing fraction of these users’ overall online news consumption. Finally, while the size, intensity, and growth of this echo chamber present real concerns, we find no evidence that they are caused by YouTube recommendations. Rather, consumption of radical content on YouTube appears to reflect broader patterns of news consumption across the web. Our results emphasize the importance of measuring consumption directly rather than inferring it from recommendations.

Far-right extremists use the internet to recruit and connect with other radicalised individuals and spread their propaganda online, with them being prolific users of online forums and social media. Such online data can be analysed using linguistic tools to identify markers of radicalisation in social media, forum posts, and other extremist texts. Few studies have examined how language and sentiment online evolves in extremist forums, which provides insight into how radicalisation into extremism unfolds overtime. To address this gap, we examine how the extremist language used by Australian members of the online far-right forum Iron March changed in relation to the level of engagement on the forum, as well as assessing whether any relationship existed between online extremist sentiment and offline violence. Forum data were computationally coded and analysed using the Grievance Dictionary, which is designed to identify psycholinguistic indicators of extremism. Results indicate that while extremist language changes over time, there was no support for the suggestion that greater forum engagement results in higher levels of extremist sentiment. The results found that a high level of online extremist sentiment is associated with offline violence. Findings are linked to existing literature, and limitations in the study design are acknowledged.

The online presence of incels, or involuntary celibates, has been an increasing security concern for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers in recent years, given that self-identified incels – including Alek Minassian and Elliot Rodger – used the Internet to disseminate incel ideology and manifestos prior to committing acts of violence. However, little is empirically known about the incel movement in general or their online communities in particular. The present study draws from a set of comments from r/Incels, a now defunct but once popular subreddit dedicated to the incel community, and compares the most highly-upvoted comments (n = 500) to a random set of other comments (n = 500) in the subreddit. This qualitative analysis focuses on identifying subcultural discourse that is widely supported and engaged with by members of the online community and the extent to which incels utilize this online space to reaffirm deviant behavior. Our study underscores the importance, as well as the difficulties, of drawing from online sources like web-forums to generate new knowledge on deviant communities and behaviors. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this analysis, its limitations, and avenues for future research.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), like no other terrorist organization before, has used Twitter and other social media channels to broadcast its message, inspire followers, and recruit new fighters. Though much less heralded, ISIS opponents have also taken to Twitter to castigate the ISIS message. This report draws on publicly available Twitter data to examine this ongoing debate about ISIS on Arabic Twitter and to better understand the networks of ISIS supporters and opponents on Twitter. To support the countermessaging effort and to more deeply understand ISIS supporters and opponents, this study uses a mixed-methods analytic approach to identify and characterize in detail both ISIS support and opposition networks on Twitter. This analytic approach draws on community detection algorithms that help detect interactive communities of Twitter users, lexical analysis that can identify key themes and content for large data sets, and social network analysis.

Despite the ongoing need for practitioners to identify violent extremists online before their engagement in violence offline, little is empirically known about their digital footprints generally or differences in their posting behaviors compared to their non-violent counterparts particularly – especially on high-frequency posting days. Content analysis was used to examine postings from a unique sample of violent and non-violent right-wing extremists as well as from a sample of postings within a sub-forum of the largest white supremacy forum during peak and non-peak posting days for comparison purposes. Several noteworthy posting behaviors were identified that may assist in identifying credible threats online.