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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.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

The previous chapter makes it clear that the Internet and communications technology have become important frontiers in the struggle against gender-based violence. Discussing, in particular, the everyday lived experience of violence against women online, it illustrated the extent to which online gender-based violence has been normalized as well as the direct linkages between online violence, offline harms, and intertwined structures of oppression based on patriarchy, Global North–South divides, and other social hierarchies. While Chapter 3 offered insight primarily into the experiences of domestic and interpersonal violence facilitated through online platforms, it left unaddressed the issue of how gender-based violence can be deployed by extremists using technology to further their own ends. The present chapter explores how online extremist violence both deploys gender discourse and uses gendered labour to further its end. This analysis looks primarily at the role of social media, but also addresses the role of messaging apps, decentralized platforms, and other related technologies.

This book constitutes a journey into the obscure field of sectarian-guided discourses of radical Islamist groups. It provides new insights into the ideological mechanisms utilized by such organizations to incite sectarian conflicts and recruit local and foreign guardians to their alleged cause. This book examines diverse aspects and dimensions of the discourses of Sunni-based ISIS and Shia-based al-Hashd al-Shaabi and explores manipulative and ideological discursive strategies utilized by media outlets associated with these groups. It delves into linguistic and contextual activities, implicit and explicit messages within the discourses of various media outlets operating in the heart of the Middle East. It also scrutinizes and explains aspects of politicization, religionization and sectarianization within the media discourse of terrorist groups in the digital era.