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Extreme digital speech (EDS) is an emerging challenge that requires co-ordination between governments, civil society and the private sector. In this report, a range of experts on countering extremism consider the challenges that EDS presents to these stakeholders, the impact that EDS has and the responses taken by these actors to counter it. By focusing on EDS, consideration of the topic is limited to the forms of extreme speech that take place online, often on social media platforms and multimedia messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram. Furthermore, by focusing on EDS rather than explicitly violent forms of extreme speech online, the report departs from a focus on violence and incorporates a broader range of issues such as hateful and dehumanising speech and the complex cultures and politics that have formed around EDS.

This report contains findings from a study that investigated extreme far right groups’
usages of social media. This was a collaborative project building on an existing
partnership between the Departments of Linguistics and Criminology at Swansea
University, and on the development of a new partnership with the social media
analytics company ‘Blurrt’ (www.blurrt.co.uk). The project was funded by the
CHERISH-DE multidisciplinary research centre at Swansea University
(http://www.cherish-de.uk/) and the School of Arts & Humanities at Edith Cowan
University (https://www.ecu.edu.au/schools/arts-and-humanities).
This report provides an overview of the aims, methodology and key findings of this
project. The project was conducted between January and August 2017. It drew upon
data from two social media platforms (Facebook and Twitter), collected over a 10-
week period (January-April 2017), and concerned two extreme far right groups:
Britain First and Reclaim Australia. Further publications will be appearing in due
course and those interested in hearing more about the project should contact the
report’s authors (details on p.23).

In this study, we examine key psychological dimensions in the manifestos authored by the perpetrators of the Christchurch and Utøya massacres, the right-wing extremists Brenton Tarrant and Anders Breivik, and the ISIS propaganda magazine Rumiyah. All texts were authored and disseminated virtually with the purpose of attracting or consolidating support, and justifying violent, discriminatory actions. While right-wing supremacist and extremist Islamist discourses are ostensibly ideologically opposed, previous research has posited the existence of ideational and emotive commonalities. We approach this from a corpus-linguistic perspective, and employ the software LIWC2015 and Wmatrix to explore the dominant psychological dimensions, semantic categories and keywords in these texts. We identify elements that contribute to the construction of a narrative of hate, peril and urgency, and discuss differences in the imagery used to construct these meanings and to appeal to different audiences. Whilst our analysis supports the existence of commonalities in ideological content and discursive strategies, our results identify differences in the target of hate in right-wing supremacist discourse and we differentiate between primarily Islamophobic and racist motives. Finally, we also discuss the limitations inherent in employing these software tools to analyse discourse in the Web 2.0 era.

Over recent years, the German extreme right has undergone significant changes, including the appropriation of symbols, styles, and action repertoires of contemporary (youth) cultures, sometimes even taken from the far left. In this article, we investigate extreme right visual communication through Facebook, focusing on claims to truth and authentic Nazism in relation to ‘history’, ‘nature’, and ‘gender roles’. These themes were central in National Socialism, but today need to be (re)negotiated vis-à-vis contemporary (youth) cultures. We show that while a traditional notion of ideological authority is enabled through visuals, there is also a strand of imagery depicting and celebrating ‘intimate’ communion. While this simultaneity leads to tensions within the ‘ideal extreme right subject’, we argue that such dilemmas can also be productive, allowing for the (re)negotiation of classic National Socialist doctrine in the context of contemporary (youth) cultures, and thus, potentially, for a revitalisation of the extreme right.

Exploring the cases of India and Ethiopia, this article develops the concept of “extreme speech” to critically analyze the cultures of vitriolic exchange on Internet-enabled media. While online abuse is largely understood as “hate speech,” we make two interventions to problematize the presuppositions of this widely invoked concept. First, extreme speech emphasizes the need to contextualize online debate with an attention to user practices and particular histories of speech cultures. Second, related to context, is the ambiguity of online vitriol, which defies a simple antonymous conception of hate speech versus acceptable speech. The article advances this analysis using the approach of “comparative practice,” which, we suggest, complicates the discourse of Internet “risk” increasingly invoked to legitimate online speech restrictions.

This article explores how the notion of “extreme speech” can advocate a context-specific, practice-oriented approach to alt-right digital culture while also foregrounding its imbrication in larger histories of racial formation. Designating the popular White-nationalist hashtag #whitegenocide as an alt-right structure of feeling, it uses a data-critical discourse on “digital traces” to support a form of social media ethnography that traces affective communication practices online. Bringing this framework to the analysis of top #whitegenocide retweets, it elaborates the functioning of alt-right affective economies of transgression, which, driven by reactionary irony and a sense of race-based threat, contribute to shaping civil discourse and defining Whiteness in digital spaces. Finally, it investigates how the locative and corporal traces left by individual #whitegenocide retweeters both shape and are shaped by larger affective economies of transgression.