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By exploring lessons learned from Ethiopia and Finland, this article challenges two assumptions about online hate speech research. First, it challenges the assumption that the best way to understand controversial concepts such as online hate speech is to determine how closely they represent or mirror some underlying set of facts or state of affairs online or in social media. Second, it challenges the assumption that academic research should be seen as separate from the many controversies that surround online hate speech debates globally. In its place, the article proposes the theory of “commentary” as a comparative research framework aimed at explaining how the messy and complex world of online and social media practices is articulated as hate speech over other ways of imagining this growing problem in global digital media environments.

Critical assessments of the recent resurgence of right-wing nationalism have rightly highlighted the role of social media in these troubling times, yet they are constrained by an overemphasis on celebrity leaders defined as populists. This article departs from a leader-centric analysis and the liberal frame that still largely informs the assessment of political action, to foreground “fun” as a salient aspect of right-wing mobilization. Building on ethnographic fieldwork among the Hindu nationalists in India, I argue that fun is a meta practice that shapes the interlinked practices of fact-checking, abuse, assembly and aggression among online volunteers for the right-wing movement. Furthermore, fun remains crucial for an experience of absolute autonomy among online users in ideological battles. Providing the daily drip feed for exclusion, fun as a meta practice bears a formal similarity to objectivity in its performative effects of distance and deniability.

Internet memes have become a popular form through which northern Chileans express frustrations with their marginalization on global, national, and local levels. At the same time, many of these memes criticize Bolivian immigrants for using resources and taking jobs from “true Chileans.” The humorous nature of these texts mitigates the extremity of embedded racial and nationalist ideologies, which are more explicitly expressed in political speech, news media, and quotidian language. This article uses critical discourse analysis to trace ideological formations across multiple online and offline instantiations, making visible a continuum of extreme speech. Through these connections, we see how anti-immigrant discourses position northern residents in a formation of nested marginality. Memes are thus a central way that disenfranchised Chilean citizens reinforce a worldview in which they consider themselves deserving of greater access to resources than Bolivians, precisely because of their marginalized position in relation to the nation.

This article looks at extreme speech practices in Danish weblogs and Facebook comment threads that treat issues of refugees, migration, Islam, and opponents as a cultural war of values and conflict. The article highlights the ritualized ways in which anti-immigrant sentiments are being communicated, received, and responded to. Such recurrent ritualistic communicative patterns include the use of a distinct indignant tone, sarcasm, racialized reasoning, and the use of “high-fives,” as well as a general indifference to facts. The article argues that these online speech patterns can best be understood as a form of “ritualized opposition” that relies on extremist, divisive use of language and naturalization of racialized difference in its attempt to recruit and consolidate communities of support.

Recent years have seen a great deal of interest in phenomena such as Al Qaida ‘terrorism’, Islamic ‘radicalism’ or, increasingly, ‘jihadism’ – on the Internet. However, as I argue in this thesis, much work in these areas has been problematic for a number of reasons. Much literature has been narrowly focused on the security issues which it pre-judges the content to raise, and has therefore taken some aspects too literally while ignoring others. Conversely, where authors have addressed ‘jihadi’ content or ‘electronic jihad’ as a phenomenon unto itself, they have had difficulty making sense of it within religious studies or political communication frameworks. In this dissertation, I propose an alternative approach. Deliberately eschewing frameworks based on pre-existing conceptions of religion or politics, I draw, instead, on the academic literature on fandom and subcultural media consumption. Using this conceptual lens, I attempt to analyse jihadism on the Internet (which I define in terms of online consumption of, and identification with self-described ‘jihadi’ content) as a subcultural phenomenon on its own terms. I argue that, without necessarily denying the role that beliefs and ideals expressed in ‘jihadi’ content may sometimes have in sustaining the physical violence of the ‘global jihad’, the cultural practices which constitute Internet jihadism have a tactical logic of their own which may not always coincide with the ‘strategic’ interests of ‘global jihad’. By better understanding what ‘ordinary’ jihadis, most of whom will never participate in violence, get out of their practices, and how they negotiate the apparent contradictions of their situation, I suggest that we may be better placed to understand not only why some jihadis ‘fail’ to negotiate these contradictions, but also, perhaps, to raise questions about how popular media consumption works more generally.

Research into the international agreements that increase cooperation over cybersecurity challenges is severely lacking. This is a necessary next step for bridging diplomatic challenges over cybersecurity. This work aspires to be push the bounds of research into these agreements and offer a tool that future researchers can rely on. For this research I created, and made publicly available, the International Cybersecurity Cooperation Dataset (ICCD), which contains over 350 international cybersecurity agreements and pertinent metadata. Each agreement is marked per which subtopics within cybersecurity related agreements it covers. These typologies are:
• Discussion and Dialogue
• Research
• Confidence Building Measures
• Incident Response
• Crime
• Capacity Building
• Activity Limiting
• Defense
• Terrorism
Drawing on ICCD and R for summary statistics and significance tests, as well as some quantitative insights, this research explores the relationship between different agreements, organizations, and other possibly related factors. The most significant takeaways from this research are:
1. Governments view cybersecurity in terms of relative advantages and are hesitant to engage competitors with agreements over topics like incident response and capacity building.
2. Authoritarian governments are involved with agreements over controlling or projecting state power and government authority while democratic governments focus on resilience and defense.
3. There are two groupings of authoritarian governments, those with high technical capabilities and those without. Technically capable governments focus on agreements over terrorism, and they also often end up participating in activity limiting agreements. Those without are preoccupied with agreements over criminal activity.
4. Discussion and dialogue agreements tend to accompany agreements over additional topics about one fifth of the time. While policy-makers shouldn’t create a hard rule out of this statistic, it does possibly strengthen an optimistic hypothesis that dialogue consistently leads to agreements.
Hopefully this research invigorates researchers’ interest in studying and understanding when cooperation over cybersecurity is successful or not. Policy-makers will need this knowledge if they are to achieve their goals in an environment that is rapidly increasing in state actors and
complexity