Online Library

The seven articles in this special issue were selected from those delivered at a series of workshops undertaken by the European Commission H2020-funded Building Resilience Against Violent Extremism (BRaVE) Project in 2020–2021. Understanding polarization and (violent) extremism as distinct, interlinked, phenomena, the collected articles ask how online platforms can be mobilised to disrupt and reframe ideologies underpinning polarising and extremist messaging. To what extent can social media platforms serve as critical resources that contribute to building pro-social resilience? And, how can we build on what has been effective so far in terms of building online resilience, including what else might social media platforms and their users do to enhance what has already been found to be effective?

This thesis aimed to address these limitations by developing a cross-platform analysis framework for online-hate researchers to gain a clearer understanding of the dynamics of the global hate ecosystem. More specifically, the designing of this framework involved examining the main functionalities of existing online-hate analysis frameworks, and the extent to which they address cross-platform hate. The strengths and limitations of these approaches then informed the functional requirements of the cross-platform analysis framework. To demonstrate how the framework can provide novel insights into online-hate research, this thesis also details its application to various case studies, including online hate from white supremacy-supporting users and environments spread during the 2020 US election and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The mass shooting in and around the Tops grocery store in Buffalo, New York on May 14, 2022 that claimed the lives of ten individuals and injured three others was all the more horrific because of the white supremacist ideological motivation that fueled it and the shooter’s meticulous planning. The disturbing reality is that this attack is part of an epidemic of mass shootings often perpetrated by young men radicalized online by an ideology of hate. This report details what my office has learned about how the Buffalo shooter was first indoctrinated and radicalized through online platforms, and how he used these and other platforms to plan, implement, and promote these acts of terror. The report assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the response of various online platforms in the wake of the Buffalo shooting. Readers should be cautioned that this report contains graphic textual descriptions of bigotry and violence, including quotes from the shooter’s own writing that, in our opinion, are necessary to contextualize and explain this story.

This article presents a systematic linguistic approach to mapping gender differences in the formulation and practice of right-wing ideology. We conducted a set of content- and text-analytical analyses on a 52,760 words corpus from a female-only subforum, dubbed LOTIES (Ladies of the Invisible Empire), compared with a matching corpus of 1.793 million words from a male-only subforum of the Ku Klux Klan’s primary website. Using a combination of computational and noncomputational linguistic methods, we show that the wholesome and avowedly prosocial discourse of the female forum is a gateway to Klan activity and, ultimately, to the Klan’s ideology through a fear-based “all means are necessary” mindset and violent sentiments. The findings also suggest that the female forum’s porousness and emphasis on inclusion and homogeneity may have facilitated the spontaneous “mutation” of the traditional KKK ideology into a generic Far-Right ideology that enjoys broad consensus. Rhetorically, this generic right-wing ideology downplays overt racial and violent elements and eschews theological controversies by relating to Christianity instrumentally as a cultural heritage rather than a religion in the metaphysical sense of the word.

Despite an increasing number of attacks by violent anti-Good Friday Agreement (GFA) Republicans from 2009 there is still relatively little understanding of the nature of these organizations or the likely longevity of their campaign(s). This analysis argues that the current upsurge of violence is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, due to a combination of factors that entrench republican ideology. The fractured nature of anti-GFA groups and the declining stature of the Provisional movement are key factors that energize anti-agreement sentiment. In particular, this study identifies the Internet as one of the most significant emerging drivers in that it has the potential to sustain social networks that create and reinforce a traditional minded Irish Republican constituency implacably committed to using violence in pursuit of its goals.

We have examined two mobile applications that have received significant attention in
coverage of the Iraq insurgency. The first, FireChat, is a U.S.-developed mobile messaging platform that
facilitates off-the-grid messaging; features which make it ideal in situations where Internet access is restricted,
and that has resulted in growing user numbers in Iraq. However, it is crucial that as applications such as
FireChat become more popular in dangerous environments like Iraq, that users are informed about the security
features and limitations of using such tools. The second application, Dawn of Glad Tidings, is an Android app
developed by ISIS that has been reported to broadcast messages using the Twitter accounts of users who
install the application.