Online Library

Social media platforms like Reddit, YouTube, and Instagram amplify rapid dissemination of negative sentiment, potentially causing harm and fostering extremist discourse. This paper addresses the NLP challenge of predicting sudden spikes in negative sentiment by fine-tuning multilingual transformer models. We present a structured pipeline emphasizing linguistic feature extraction and temporal modeling. Our experimental results, obtained from extensive Reddit, YouTube, and Instagram data, demonstrate improved forecasting accuracy over baseline methods. Ethical considerations and implications for deployment in social media moderation are thoroughly discussed. The system includes user-centric interactive features such as real-time filtering dashboards, customizable negativity thresholds, and forecasting analytics, providing actionable insights for preventative content moderation. Given its real-time deployment potential and cross-platform applicability, our system offers actionable insights for proactive content moderation.

It has been established by leaders of the Australian national security community, such as the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and the Australian Federal Police, that young people are being increasingly recruited into extremism. To date, few Australian studies have examined this issue using primary source data. This article seeks to understand the conditions which may make vulnerable young Australians more susceptible to recruitment, recruitment pathways, and forms of recruitment. To address this, primary sources were consulted, and frontline countering violent extremism (CVE) practitioners were interviewed. It was found that there is no typical pathway for young Australians to be recruited to extremism and that recruitment can be both foreign (informed by transnational networks and organisations) and/or familiar (within the immediate domestic environment of the young person). We identified the continued significance of online vectors, but further established the ongoing relevance and power of offline engagement for the recruitment of young people. Finally, we suggest that multiple intersecting vulnerabilities render young people more susceptible to recruitment, with data that suggests they may be naïve to their being recruited in the first place.

Mubin Shaikh, Police Project Consultant with the Romeo Dallaire Initiative, discusses the evolution of radical propaganda online, social media and foreign fighters and the need for a robust counter narrative. Mr. Shaikh brings his real world knowledge of these issues as a former CSIS and RCMP operative, discussing them from the perspective of a real world and online counter-terrorism practitioner.

This interview is part of The SecDev Foundation’s Prevent Violent Extremism: A Social Media Research Portal – https://preventviolentextremism.info/

Previous research has highlighted the prominent behavior of lone wolf terrorists to produce and share a manifesto publicly, outlining their frustrations and motivations for their eventual terrorist attack. This article aims to explore this phenomenon, focusing on the timelapse between when a terrorist manifesto is posted online and when the eventual attack occurs, discussing the time difference between the two events for 12 cases of lone wolf terrorism. The results revealed that the average time lapse between when a manifesto was posted online and when the terrorist attack occurs is one hour, 43 min. Limitations and implications are discussed in detail.

The problem of terrorism is both an immediate threat and a long-term issue of safety
and social cohesion, locally and globally. An immediate threat requires relatively
straightforward interventions. Our public debates seem to be focusing too much on “fire-
fighting” crisis management, and congratulating ourselves on instant emotional displays
of solidarity, without paying enough attention to the substantial challenges of developing
a broader social consensus, and a culture of mutual respect. More specifically, we need to
find new ways to understand how local and global issues intersect, and why the global
hegemony of one or two superpowers no longer seems to deliver stability and security
(even for themselves). This is particularly true in a world where national borders have
less and less relevance for the homogeneity of populations, cultures or values, and where
whole communities, for instance, continue practices with impunity which are completely
unacceptable to others – as well as being illegal, e.g. female genital mutilation. This
paper explores some key theoretical issues which might help us to understand some of the
underlying longer-term issues: the articulation of identity, culture, and power, and impact
of micro-practices on global cohesion and security. The new globally connected social
media have a central role to play in this analysis.

This paper investigates one sub-topic within a right-wing extremist (RWE) movement in India – love jihad, a conspiracy created by Hindutva nationalists alleging that Muslims forcefully convert Hindu women to Islam with allurements of love. Love jihad narratives and digital dissemination tactics serve a nation-building, patriarchal and vote-seeking function for the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP and allied nationalist and media organisations have led many anti-love jihad campaigns. However, this study investigates how ­non-elite – ordinary – social media users construct love jihad discourse through a discourse analysis of 188 sub-sampled tweets from February to October 2023. The analysis finds relative congruence in how non-elites, elites, media and nationalist organisations frame love jihad. The invoked themes – Muslim exclusionism, patriarchy, nationalism and post-truth politics – are cross-cutting and mutually reinforcing but can also be categorised based on which appears at the forefront. I use this organisation to highlight novel frames within each theme and their implicit and explicit cross-cutting dimensions. Finally, these findings can be situated in broader discussions around the connection between populism and post-truth politics, and call for reconceptualising online social movements.