Online Library

Lessons learned after one year of the NetzDG law.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

The 8th Euromed Survey conducted by the European Institute of the Mediterranean touches
upon a number of important and complex issues related to violent extremism in the EuroMediterranean
region, including the question of the context and drivers through which violent
extremism can prosper. Echoing some of the results, this article looks into propaganda as a
tool of extremist ideologies and how to counter it.

The terrorist attacks in Norway in 2011 and New Zealand in 2019 have revealed that the far-right worldwide uses the memory of the Yugoslav wars for online mobilization. Scholars working on memory activism usually deal with the liberal, self-critical memory emerging from the bottom-up activism of human rights groups while neglecting the activism of the far-right. This article fills the gap by addressing the global circulation of two memes, Remove Kebab and Pepe the Frog, as examples of far-right memory activism. In order to address the transnational circulation of memes as memory activism, this article employs the concept of ‘traveling memory’ while relying on multimodal discourse analysis to unveil the processes of memetic transformation, imitation, iconization and narrativization. The analysis reveals an alternative memory of Yugoslav wars that depicts Serbia as the first case of ‘white genocide’ in Europe, reversing the roles of war criminals and victims while propagating violence and celebrating genocide. The article argues that memory studies can no longer ignore memory production of far-right communities and, at the same time, outlines the method for examining far-right digital memory activism, revealing a whole set of mnemonic practices developed among the anonymous fringe communities of the far-right.

Online extremism remains a persistent problem despite the best efforts of governments, tech companies and civil society. Digital technologies can induce group polarization to promote extremism and cause substantial changes to extremism (e.g., create new forms of extremism, types of threats or radicalization approaches). Current methods to counter extremism induce undesirable side‐effects (e.g., ostracize minorities, inadvertently promote extremism) or do not leverage the full potential of digital technologies. Extremism experts recognize the need for researchers from other disciplines, like information systems, to contribute their technical expertise for understanding and countering online extremism. This article aims to introduce the field of information systems to the issue of online extremism. Information systems scholars address technology‐related societal issues from a sociotechnical perspective. The sociotechnical perspective describes systems through a series of interactions between social (structure, people) and technical components (physical system, task). We apply the sociotechnical perspective to (1) summarize the current state‐of‐the‐art knowledge of 222 articles in a systematic multi‐disciplinary literature review and (2) propose specific research questions that address two questions (How do digital technologies augment extremism? How can we successfully counter online extremism?).