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We analyzed posts written by Facebook profiles who advocate violent jihad without supporting any terrorist group. They share extremist content in the middle of regular posts, thanks to which they are likely to reach a large audience. We identified to what extent their ingroup-outgroup opposition is constructed in crisis, identity, and solution frames and how they use these frames in posts which sometimes breach Facebook’s community standards, but which mostly circumvent them through various strategies of doublespeak. Among them, myth, in the sense of Barthes, and eudaimonic content appeared as particularly powerful to naturalize and spread jihadi ideology on social media.

This study examines how individuals’ exposure to ISIS-related propaganda affects public sympathy for ISIS. We examine the extent that each type of communication channel (e.g. online media, traditional offline media, and in-person interactions) affects an individual’s perceptions of ISIS. We use a nationally representative sample (N = 1,609) from Turkey, which has played an important role during the rise and fall of ISIS with its unique geographical, social, and political position. The findings suggest a significant relationship between exposure to in-person propaganda and having sympathy for ISIS. However, this relationship does not exist for online and traditional media propaganda.

This article aims to map the online propaganda presence and activities of the Turkestan Islamic Party’s media arm—Islam Awazi (“Voice of Islam”). It also discusses its capabilities in terms of producing new releases and attracting online audiences. In order to reach these objectives, this study exploited a methodology which is a combination of open source intelligence techniques (OSINT) with limited content analysis. It argues that the Uyghur-oriented Islam Awazi’s (IA) propaganda strategy was primarily based on one standalone website, which constituted a central repository of its new productions. It was supported by several Telegram channels. However, open source intelligence investigation allowed other domains proliferating the IA’s productions, which were still accessible but abandoned at the time when this study was carried out, to be discovered. It also proved that the organization was capable of producing more than 160 propaganda releases between January and September 2020. Their viewership on the surface web was, however, quite limited. Finally, this study also outlines a peculiar connection between Islam Awazi’s websites and two networks of domains exploited by the cyber-criminal underground to distribute pornography and malware. This may be considered as a sign of an existing—and widely discussed by the academia—terror-crime nexus.

Despite great interest in the importance of “narrative” to the global jihadi movement, research on actual examples of jihadi storytelling has been very limited to date. In this paper, I discuss the phenomenon of jihadi storytelling, specifically in digital contexts, focusing on the case study of one storyteller in particular: “Najm al-Din Azad”, a Saudi jihadist who tweeted and blogged a collection of “Tales of the Heroism of the Mujahidin” while participating in the Syrian civil war.

Learning in extremist settings is often treated as operational, with little regard to how aspiring participants in extremist settings engage with complex and abstract ideological material. This paper examines learning in the context of the amorphous network of digital channels that compose the extreme-right online milieu. Through an in-depth qualitative analysis, we explore how well the prevailing model of extremist ideological learning (in ‘communities of practice’) accounts for the behaviour of aspiring participants of Fascist Forge, a now-defunct extreme-right web forum. The findings suggest that some of the social aspects of communities of practice have been replicated in the online setting of Fascist Forge. However, for a combination of technical and ideological reasons, the more directed and nurturing aspects of learning have not. Several issues are raised about the role of ideological learning in online communities, notably the open accessibility of extremist material, the lack of ideological control leading to potential mutation and innovation by self-learners, and the role of digital learning in the preparation, shaping and recruitment of individuals for real world organising and activism.