Online Library

The Internet is harnessed as an ideal means for organization and promotion of protest ideology, which does not require special institutional facilities for maintenance and development. Radical right-wing extremism is reckoned to be among the public sentiments employing this global network. Consequently, Russia is experiencing the tightening of Internet controls. The objective of our study is identification of the audience of Russian radical right-wing extremist online groups registered in the largest Russian social network Vkontakte and analysis of their properties under conditions of the state-sanctioned censorship of extremist content. The methodological frame of the study is the conception of modernization, which describes both the process of transformation of traditionalism into modernity and the forces of counteraction to this process. The methods of linguistic markers and social network analysis are employed as the main tools for the furtherance of our objective.

This study analysed three social media movements linked with extreme right‑wing activities online. Such activities were carried out by right‑wing extremists and those who support their philosophy of nationalism and religious conservatism, whether actively or passively. This study also investigated how themes and narratives from across the globe, such as US political discourse, Russian disinformation and conspiracy theories, are combined with real‑life local grievances in order to appeal to similarly aligned followers to help to disseminate and legitimise reactionary speech.

The online domain potentially provides research with a vast body of data. The big quest within contemporary research is to make sense of all this data. A possibility to handle such data is by combining methods from the fields of new media and linguistics. Several studies have sought to understand how radicalism online comes to exist and grows. To date, however, none of these studies have fruitfully analysed language patterns within online communities that move beyond keyword analysis. In this thesis, I demonstrate a proof of concept for a classifier analysing and predicting salient language features within online radical discourse from the social media platform Reddit. Data consist of two datasets, radical and non-radical in nature, both containing 1 millions lines of text per dataset. The radical dataset is known for its radical nature, promoting radicalism in a variety of beliefs such as anti-feminism or white supremacy. Using software libraries as NLTK and SciKit within Python, I submitted that data to keyword and collocation frequency count, lexical diversity, a part-of-speech tagger and ultimately as features for a document classifier. Results showed that the radical discourse used in this thesis contains salient language features and show a clear sense of a virtual community. Finally, I discuss the implications of this thesis and provide directions for further research. Data was provided by TNO The Hague as part of the VOX-Pol project.

Progressive political movements and activists are not the only ones appropriating Web 2.0 as a way to construct independent public spaces and voice counter- hegemonic discourses. By looking at the other extreme of (post-)fascist movements, it will be shown that the internet also gives rise to anti-public spaces, voicing hatred and essentialist discourses. In this article, discourses of hate produced by North- Belgian (post-)fascist movements and activists will be analysed. Theoretically the analysis is informed by radical pluralism and the limits of freedom of speech in a strong democracy. The cases presented challenge the limits of freedom of speech and of radical pluralism and bring us to question whether being a racist is a democratic right, whether freedom of speech includes opinions and views that challenge basic democratic values.

This Strategic Studies Institute book provides a comprehensive research guide to radical Islamist English-language online magazines published between April-May 2007 and November 2016, as well as Islamic State eBooks published between November 2012 and November 2015, and a number of assorted radical Islamist news magazines, reports, and pocketbooks. A comparative analysis of Inspire and Dabiq magazine issues are provided along with strategic insights related to al-Qaeda and Islamic State online magazine clusters and their differing strategic approaches as articulated in these magazines. Finally, policy response options, utilizing a targeting schema leveraging the five stages of the magazine life-cycle process: environmental motivators, production, end product, distribution, and outcomes, are discussed.

Departing from Jessie Daniels’s 2013 review of scholarship on race and racism online, this article maps and discusses recent developments in the study of racism and hate speech in the subfield of social media research. Systematically examining 104 articles, we address three research questions: Which geographical contexts, platforms, and methods do researchers engage with in studies of racism and hate speech on social media? To what extent does scholarship draw on critical race perspectives to interrogate how systemic racism is (re)produced on social media? What are the primary methodological and ethical challenges of the field? The article finds a lack of geographical and platform diversity, an absence of researchers’ reflexive dialogue with their object of study, and little engagement with critical race perspectives to unpack racism on social media. There is a need for more thorough interrogations of how user practices and platform politics co-shape contemporary racisms.