Online Library

Academic literature widely assumes that extremist-housing online forums, like 4chan, uniformly celebrate acts of right-wing terrorism (e.g. via “sainthood memes”), such as those committed by Anders Breivik and Brenton Tarrant. Aside from a handful of exceptions, this body of research typically fails to acknowledge that ideologically likeminded individuals on 4chan also regularly debate the merits of both terrorists and their violent attacks. Our topic modeling of 100 thousand posts on 4chan’s infamous /pol/ board shows—heated—debates over Breivik and Tarrant ranging from celebratory, to condemning, and moral to conspiratorial. We argue that overlooking these debates limits valuable theoretical and practical insights.

This paper explores various Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques in order to identify a range of potentially ‘important’ members of Islamic Networks within Dark Web Forums. For this experiment, we conducted our investigation on five forums collected in previous work as part of the DarkWeb Forum portal and built upon the tool support created in our previous research in order to visualise and analyse the network. Whilst existing work attempts to identify these structures through state-of-the-art Computational Linguistic techniques, our work relies on the communication metadata alone. Our analysis involved first calculating a range of SNA metrics to better understand the group members, and then apply unsupervised learning in order to create clusters that would help classify the Dark Web Forums users into hierarchical clusters. In order to create our social networks, we investigated the effect of repeated author resolution and various weighting schemes on the ranking of forum members by creating four social networks per forum and evaluating the correlation of the top n users (for n = 10; 20; 30; 40; 50 and 100). Our results identified that varying the weighting schemes created more consistent ranking schemes than varying the repeated author resolution.

Hate groups are increasingly using multiple social media platforms to promote extremist ideologies. Yet we know little about their communication practices across platforms. How do hate groups (or “in-groups”), frame their hateful agenda against the targeted group or the “out-group?” How do they share information? Utilizing “framing” theory from social movement research and analyzing domains in the shared links, we juxtapose the Facebook and Twitter communication of 72 Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) designated hate groups spanning five hate ideologies. Our findings show that hate groups use Twitter for educating the audience about problems with the out-group, maintaining positive self-image by emphasizing in-group’s high social status, and for demanding policy changes to negatively affect the out-group. On Facebook, they use fear appeals, call for active participation in group events (membership requests), all while portraying themselves as being oppressed by the out-group and failed by the system. Our study unravels the ecosystem of cross-platform communication by hate groups, suggesting that they use Facebook for group radicalization and recruitment, while Twitter for reaching a diverse follower base.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

This report contains articles presented at the Countering Daesh Experts Workshop convened by The Carter Center Feb. 22–24, 2016, in Atlanta, Ga. The workshop brought together 21 leading scholars and practitioners from 10 different countries to discuss Daesh recruitment strategies and its use of social media technologies to appeal to alienated youth. In addition to developing insights into recruitment and social media use, the workshop aimed to develop nuanced counternarratives that engage religious resources, leaders, and institutions in peacebuilding in their local contexts and to promote a deeper understanding of religion in conflict.

To see the Internet as only a ‘tool’ or ‘resource’ for disseminating ideas and products, as much of the literature has done, is to miss an even more significant aspect of online venues. The Internet is also a site of important ‘identity work’, in which collective identities can be accomplished interactively. This chapter explores how collective identities are constructed by white supremacists who specifically exploit the web as a venue for expressing ‘white pride worldwide’. Drawing on social movement literature around the building of collective identities, we examine the online identity work of the ‘globalizing’ right-wing extremist movement through four key frames: alternative media/alternative messaging; identity borders; shared identity; and mobilizing hate. Here, we explore the Internet not as a tool, but as site for the active construction of collective white identity.