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Recent decades have seen a blurring of the line between extremist movements and mainstream politics, driven by rising sectarian polarization. This development has been linked to digital media, with suggestions that so-called echo chambers may drive political radicalization. To understand the social processes taking place inside such digital spaces, this article draws on Randall Collins and the Durkheimian tradition to develop a theory of discursive community formation. Empirically, we analyze 20 years of discussion on the White Power forum Stormfront, employing natural language processing to study discursive evolution as members become socialized into the community. Our findings suggest that digital media provide space for conversational rituals that instill in people a sense of social membership and intersubjectivity, contained in the elaboration of a shared discourse, within which certain beliefs become sacred and unquestionable. This provides a potential social mechanism linking echo chambers to the rise of sectarian polarization.

The English Defence League (EDL) is the biggest populist street movement in a generation. Yet the make-up of the group and what its members believe remain a mystery because it has no formal joining procedures or membership list and much of its activity takes place online. The collection of large amounts of data from social media presents new opportunities for social research to understand the relationship between off- and online activity. As more movements combine – and blur – virtual and real protest, these questions will become increasingly urgent and important. These surveys, collected through Facebook using a new methodology, offer new ways forward in exploring this challenge.

This case study explores the convergence of white extremist political ideology with mainstream political ideology on the micro-blogging platform Twitter – a phenomenon termed “inter-ideological mingling”. Exploring the spread of white extremism in the digital environment can provide insight into the growth of hate groups in the physical environment. A sample of 4800 tweets was examined through hierarchical cluster analysis and textual analysis. Several pieces of evidence were found supporting inter-ideological mingling. Cluster analysis shows that extremist terms are not isolated from terms found in mainstream political discourse. Textual analysis of individual tweets provides evidence for five strategies of inter-ideological mingling: joining, blending, piggybacking, backstaging, and narrating.

In this paper we present a novel interactive multimodal learning system, which facilitates search and exploration in large networks of social multimedia users. It allows the analyst to identify and select users of interest, and to find similar users in an interactive learning setting. Our approach is based on novel multimodal representations of users, words and concepts, which we simultaneously learn by deploying a general-purpose neural embedding model. The usefulness of the approach is evaluated using artificial actors, which simulate user behavior in a relevance feedback scenario. Multiple experiments were conducted in order to evaluate the quality of our multimodal representations and compare different embedding strategies. We demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed approach on a multimedia collection originating from the violent online extremism forum Stormfront, which is particularly interesting due to the high semantic level of the discussions it features.

Over the last several years, there has been an alarming increase in antisemitic incidents across the globe. Today, the apparent majority originate online. As social media posts do not stop at international borders, members of the national legislatures of Australia, Canada, Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States have come together across party lines to launch the Inter-Parliamentary Task Force to Combat Online Antisemitism.

The United Kingdom (UK) has been at the vanguard of online censorship in democracies from the beginning of the modern internet. Since the mid-1990s the government has developed distinctive patterns of regulation – targeting intermediaries, using the bully pulpit to promote ‘voluntary’ self-regulation, and promoting automated censorship tools such as web blocking – which have been influential internationally but raise significant issues of legitimacy, transparency and accountability. This chapter examines this UK experience in light of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and EU law, arguing that in key regards current censorship practices fail to meet European standards.

The chapter builds on the existing literature in two main ways. First, it assesses emerging censorship practices in the area of terrorist material and extreme pornography. Second, it considers how recent EU legislation and ECtHR case law might constrain the freedom of the UK government and force a move towards different models of censorship.

The chapter starts by outlining the regulatory context. It then takes three case studies – Child Abuse Material (CAM), terrorist material, and pornography/extreme pornography under the Digital Economy Act 2017 – and traces how censorship has evolved from one context to the next. These systems are then evaluated against the standards set by European law and in particular Articles 6 and 10 ECHR, the Open Internet Regulation, and the Directives on Sexual Abuse of Children and on Combating Terrorism.