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Public opinion is of critical importance to businesses and governments. It represents the collective opinion and prevalent views about a certain topic, policy, or issue. Extreme public opinion consists of extreme views held by individuals that advocate and spread radical ideas for the purpose of radicalizing others. while the proliferation of social media gives unprecedented reach and visibility and a platform for freely expressing public opinion, social media fora can also be used for spreading extreme views, manipulating public opinions, and radicalizing others. In this work, we leverage data mining and analytics techniques to study extreme public opinion expressed using social medial. A dataset of 259,904 tweets posted between 21/02/2016 and 01/05/2021 was collected in relation to extreme nationalism, hate speech, and supremacy. The collected data was analyzed using a variety to techniques, including sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, social circle analysis, and opinion leaders’ identification, and results related to an American politician and an American right-wing activist were presented. The results obtained are very promising and open the door to the ability to monitor the evolution of extreme views and public opinion online.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

The ISD Germany study on the extreme right-wing use of Telegram serves as a complementary text to the “Escape routes” report. In it, the research team examined links to other platforms, which were shared on the controversial messenger service and were disseminated in the channels of right-wing extremists, right-wing radicals and conspiracy ideologues in the German-speaking world. The main scope of this research was on smaller platforms that do not fall under the deletion obligation of the NetzDG. Links to larger platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter were also analysed, given that the collected data set contained almost twice as many links to these platforms than to those not fully covered by the NetzDG.

For this report, the ISD research team collected 659,110 messages from 238 public channels from the extreme right, radical right, Reichsbürger:innen and conspiracy ideology spectrum between 1 January and 12 September 2021. From these messages, 371,988 links were extracted, leading to 8,252 domains. The ISD Germany researchers examined domains that were shared more than 15 times and identified social networks and platforms.

The author seeks to highlight just how central this unofficial Islamic State ecosystem is to audiences inspired by the group and how the interplay between this ecosystem and youth requires reframing the challenge rather than doubling down on the same playbooks. This article will first present the connection between these young peoples’ use of social media and their attacks. The author will then seek to create the tie-in between the real-world threats posed by these youth-led plots and the unofficial digital ecosystem of the Islamic State, going beyond and expanding the author’s previous work into the ecosystem. 16 This tie-in will be followed by an analysis of the unofficial Islamic State ecosystem, expanding on what the author has already published about it, and will do so by diving into the outlets and tactics central to the ecosystem, and will conclude with recommendations for digital counterterrorism practitioners and researchers. The article will build on a broader report by the author on the Islamic State’s online activities that was published by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) on February 12, 2025.