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How do right-wing extremist organisations throughout the world use the Internet as a tool for communication and recruitment? What is its role in identity-building within radical right-wing groups and how do they use the Internet to set their agenda, build contacts, spread their ideology and encourage mobilization? This important contribution to the field of Internet politics adopts a social movement perspective to address and examine these important questions. Conducting a comparative content analysis of more than 500 extreme right organizational web sites from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, it offers an overview of the Internet communication activities of these groups and systematically maps and analyses the links and structure of the virtual communities of the extreme right. Based on reports from the daily press the book presents a protest event analysis of right wing groups’ mobilisation and action strategies, relating them to their online practices. In doing so it exposes the new challenges and opportunities the Internet presents to the groups themselves and the societies in which they exist.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

This article examines the complexities of regulating hate speech on the Internet through legal frameworks. It demonstrates the limitations of unilateral national content legislation and the difficulties inherent in multilateral efforts to regulate the Internet. The article highlights how the US commitment to free speech has undermined European efforts to construct a truly international regulatory system. It is argued that a broad coalition of citizens, industry and government, employing technological, educational and legal frameworks, may offer the most effective approach through which to limit the effects of hate speech originating from outside of European borders.

This article explores the extent to which ‘transnationalism’ offers analysts a meaningful prism through which to analyze racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist (REMVE) terrorism or whether the term obscures more than it illuminates. The ‘transnational’ dimension of REMVE terrorism is often ill-defined and misunderstood, leading to misconceptions about the nature of such networks that in turn exaggerate their ‘global’ reach and distort our understanding of how they operate in practice. The digital revolution has internationalized far-right extremist networks, but many of these remain regional rather than truly transnational. Nevertheless, understanding the transnational dimension of social media and its role in the radicalization of lone-actor REMVE terrorists is increasingly important. Online REMVE communities rather than physical organizations per se serve as the medium through which violent ideologies are spread; where lessons from previous attacks are learned and internalized; where the perpetrators of violence are revered; and where further acts of violence are encouraged and incited—which, as this article demonstrates, has real-world effects. What this suggests is that, insofar as REMVE terrorism is concerned, ‘domestic’ terrorism is increasingly inseparable from tackling ‘transnational’ terrorism and that digital platforms have increasingly blurred the boundaries between the two.

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.