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President Obama reiterated his promise to destroy the virulent Islamic State Tuesday while talking about the Orlando mass shooting — and how gunman Omar Mateen, a U.S. citizen, may have been radicalized by online extremist propaganda. NewsHour producer P.J. Tobia reports on U.S. efforts to win the hearts and minds that the terrorists are trying to co-opt on the Internet.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

Involuntary celibates (incels) are individuals who feel alienated from society because of their perceived inability to attract women. They share a narrative which valorises violence as a means to restructure society according to misogynistic ideals. Since promoting a radical misogynistic ideology through violence is legally prohibited and socially unacceptable, it is necessary for incels to hide out online where virtual mediums promise anonymity. Virtual relationality (VR) allowed unorganised individuals with a shared grievance against mainstream societal values to develop into a secretive collective. VR means that individuals connect in chatrooms and internet forums where they exchange interpretations of a narrative which presents their social situation as oppressive and dehumanising. They blame ‘modernist’ values and social practices for their ills and share perspectives of how they should interact with the world. These perspectives frequently justify or condone acts of physical violence. Relating in the virtual world gave these individuals’ shared grievances a sense of coherence and allowed for an amplification of the influence of their violent acts by affirming the value of extremist ideas. VR turned individuals without consistent preferences and a unifying organisational medium into a ‘hydra’ with a felt global presence. The virtual nature of incels complicates responses by 1) enabling the collective to have global reach, 2) allowing it to function without an organised body or institutional structures, 3) making it difficult to identify individual incels, and 4) making it difficult to tell when incels pose a genuine security threat. These realities make it crucial to develop a fuller understanding of how the incel collective functions online.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

This study investigated the phenomena of group polarisation with particular attention to the differences between offline and online settings. Polarisation is a process that leads people to develop extreme ideologies. Three hundred and seven participants were recruited and randomly assigned to different experimental conditions, i.e. antisocial and prosocial polarisation, within groups of 6 people composed of four confederates, participating in discussions about a social dilemma under two different circumstances: face to face and online. The degree of polarisation was assessed considering the final decisions adopted by the participants, as well as the internal dynamics characterising their final attitudes, i.e. compliance versus conversion. Results showed that online groups appeared more susceptible to polarisation and their members reported a greater degree of conformism. In particular, within online environments, the risk of being polarised, both antisocially and prosocially, increased by around 12%. Furthermore, in an online setting, a greater degree of conversion emerged only when the members decided to adopt a pro-social behaviour, while a greater degree of compliance emerged whenever they decided to adopt antisocial behaviour.

The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) commissioned BSR to conduct a human rights assessment of its strategy, governance, and activities. The purpose of this assessment is to identify actual and potential human rights impacts (including both risks and opportunities) arising from GIFCT’s work and make recommendations for how GIFCT and its participants can address these impacts. BSR undertook this human rights review from December 2020 to May 2021. This assessment combines human rights assessment methodology based on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) with consideration of the human rights principles, standards, and methodologies upon which the UNGPs were built. This review was funded by GIFCT, though BSR retained editorial control over its contents.