Online Library

The alt-right is an online subculture marked by its devotion to the execution of a racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic politics through trolling, pranking, meme-making, and mass murder. It is this devotion to far-right politics through the discordant conjunction of humor and suicidal violence this article seeks to explain by situating the movement for the first time within its constitutive online relationships. This article adds to the existing literature by viewing the online relationships of the alt-right through the genealogy of propaganda. Through situating the alt-right alongside the genealogy of propaganda, the article offers new insights into the social isolation, increasingly extreme social and political positions, nihilism, and violence that have emerged within the alt-right. The article concludes by applying the lessons of the alt-right for online organizing across the political spectrum and argues that a class-based politics of the left is an important part of countering the rise of the alt-right.

Combatting violent extremism can involve organizing Peer-to-Peer (P2P)
preventing violent extremism (PVE) programs and social media campaigns. While
hundreds of PVE campaigns have been launched around the world in recent
months and years, very few of these campaigns have actually been reviewed,
analyzed, or assessed in any systematic way. Metrics of success and failure have
yet to be fully developed, and very little is publically known as to what might
differentiate a great and successful P2P campaign from a mediocre one. This
article will provide first-hand insight on orchestrating a publically funded,
university-based, online, peer-to-peer PVE campaign – 60 Days of PVE – based
on the experience of a group of Canadian graduate students. The article provides
an account of the group’s approach to PVE. It highlights the entirety of the
group’s campaign, from theory and conceptualization to branding, media strategy,
and evaluation, and describes the campaign’s core objectives and implementation.
The article also analyzes the campaign’s digital footprint and reach using data
gleamed from social media. Finally, the article discusses the challenges and
difficulties the group faced in running their campaign, lessons that are pertinent
for others contemplating a similar endeavour.

Social media platforms have become a prominent feature in modern-day communication, allowing users to express opinion and communicate with friends and likeminded individuals. However, with this revolutionary form of communication comes risks of exploitation and utilisation of these platforms for potentially illegal and harmful means. This article aims to explore the community guidelines and policies of prominent social media sites regarding extremist material, comparing the platform’s policies with the user experiences. To measure social media user experience and user exposure to extremist material, this article pilots the use of a new scale: The Online Extremism Exposure Scale (OECE), which measures both the user’s exposure to extremist communication and hate speech online. Users reported varied levels of exposure to both hate speech and extremist communication, with. the results indicating that users in the sample are being exposed to extremist material approximately 48.44% of the time they spend on social media daily. The results of this pilot study highlight potential failings by prominent social media platforms in their efforts to reduce users being exposed to extremist material. Limitations, future research, and implications are discussed in detail.

Contemporary research has highlighted the steady rise of individuals becoming radicalised via exposure to extremist discussion on the internet, with the ease of communication with other users that the internet provides playing a major role in the radicalisation process of these individuals. The aim of the present systematic review was to explore recent research into the utilisation of language in extremist cyberspaces and how it may influence the radicalisation process. The findings suggest that there are five prominent linguistical behaviours adopted by extremists online: Algorithmic, Conflict, Hate, Positive, and Recruitment. The results demonstrate that the main purpose of extremist language online is to shape the perceptions of users to see their associated group in positive regard, while simultaneously negatively framing outgroup opposition. This is then followed by encouraging conflict against the promoted ideologies’ perceived enemies. Limitations, future research, 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.

National governments now recognize online hate speech as a pernicious social problem. In the wake of political votes and terror attacks, hate incidents online and offline are known to peak in tandem. This article examines whether an association exists between both forms of hate, independent of ‘trigger’ events. Using Computational Criminology that draws on data science methods, we link police crime, census and Twitter data to establish a temporal and spatial association between online hate speech that targets race and religion, and offline racially and religiously aggravated crimes in London over an eight-month period. The findings renew our understanding of hate crime as a process, rather than as a discrete event, for the digital age.