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This report, by the Urban Warfare Analysis Centre, is a fictitious account of how a young person in America could become a suicide bomber for an Islamic extremist group. It is the fifth in a series of reports on Web 2.0 technology and future urban warfare. All references to people, groups, and products are intended for illustrative purposes only. As such, the authors do not suggest that any of the products or organizations listed condone or support extremist activities.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

The 2023 Supreme Court case Twitter v. Taamneh found that defendant social media companies were not liable for aiding and abetting a terrorist attack overseas. The Court alluded to the existence of an alternative set of facts that might alter their analysis or produce a different outcome. This Comment explores those “other contexts” and seeks to identify what factors could produce a successful Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) aiding and abetting claim against a social media company for an act of terrorism overseas. This is difficult, in part, because the framework for aiding and abetting liability provided in JASTA is seemingly incompatible with the operations of social media companies. To better evaluate how JASTA’s framework should apply to social media companies, both JASTA cases that do not involve social media companies and aiding and abetting cases derived from other sources are analyzed for their relevance to the social media context.

Ultimately, this Comment concludes that it would take an extraordinary set of facts to find social media companies secondarily liable for an act of terrorism. This is, in part, due to the nature of how social media operates and continues to progress at a rapid pace. The increasing role that social media plays in society highlights why deterring further Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) use of social media is critical; as avenues to recruitment and international planning increase, the risk to the United States’ national security also increases. Given that JASTA is not a solution, this Comment suggests other avenues to encourage social media companies to heighten their detection of FTO activity and prevent future attacks.

The rise of the ‘alt-right’ (alternative right) and their communications on the Internet are not unique to the West. This study follows a mixed-methods approach combining topic modeling, social network analysis, and discourse analysis to analyze the discursive and network structure of an online Chinese alt-right community on Weibo. We summarize the topics Chinese alt-right influencers discuss and examine how these topics are interrelated. We find that the Chinese alt-right discourse can be deemed as both an extension and localization of the global alt-right: they frequently discuss global alt-right issues and also hold alt-right ideologies on domestic issues. Meanwhile, influencers in the community are densely connected, suggesting a high level of coordination and cooperation. We particularly identify two discursive strategies that alt-right influencers employ to reproduce the transnational alt-right discourse, namely invented common crisis of majority culture and transnational metaphor usage. These findings provide insights into the transnational aspect of the rise of global alt-right.

VOX-Pol Blog post.