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The increased influx of refugees and migrants to the EU in 2015 has been followed by a noticeable presence of online hate speech against migrants in many countries across Europe. The article presents the results of a study of hate speech proliferation on Facebook in the Czech Republic during the summer of 2015. Its goal is to identify the producers of hate speech and determine their social background, explore the main channels of hate speech proliferation, determine the specific groups of migrants targeted by hate speech, put the hate speech in the context of online political communication, and discuss the role of media and politicians in the process of hate speech proliferation. With regard to the works of Castells, Skocpol or Bennett and Segerberg, online hate speech can be perceived as an extreme variety of new, rapidly evolving modes of political communication as such. Social and political activism has been shifting from membership-based organizations and parties towards flexible movements and initiatives with strong emphasis on the logic of identity politics. People may or may not engage in hate speech production as lone independent actors, but they still perceive their actions as part of larger collective efforts. When we focus on hate speech as a form of civic activism or networking, new interesting patterns can emerge.

This exploratory study examines the narrative space of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Specifically, we developed a methodology to gather, archive, and analyze ISIL’s online presence in social media. Our sample was drawn from transient websites (N = 8308) collected between August 2015 and October 2015. From this pool, we coded a random sample of 100 English-only articles for violent, pragmatic, and ideological themes. Exploratory factor analyses revealed two constructs: violence and ideological rationality. Our findings offer insight into the messaging and organizational dynamics of ISIL. We conclude with implications and future directions.

This is the third and final research review in the CREST series on ideological transmission (the first was on the family, and the second on peers, education and prisons). It focuses on the process by which religious and political groups – from small cells and organisations to large movements, networks and milieus – pass on ideas, beliefs and values. Academic research on how, where and why these are transmitted, and by whom, is considered. Ideological transmission is interpreted as the passing on of ideology from one person to another, or from
a group to its internal and external audiences. We treat ideology as a broad concept, encompassing both political and religious ideas, and including beliefs,values, and their related practices.
Two main persuasive orientations were considered in this review: (i) external awareness-raising by groups,and (ii) their internal attempts to influence members
and supporters. Three analytical concepts provided the focus: propaganda, framing and learning.
1. How do ideological groups make potential supporters and other outsiders aware of their views (awareness-raising/persuasion/propaganda)?
2. How is ideological material (beliefs, events, issues etc) framed by groups as they seek to raise awareness, gain recruits and energise followers?
3. How do members and other supporters acquire ideological knowledge within groups (learning/indoctrination)?
These questions are interconnected by the concept of ‘persuasion’, more specifically the active attempts used by external agents to persuade individuals. The review draws on a range of evidence from multiple disciplines and contexts. Extremist groups– violent and non-violent – provide the principal examples, including a case study on the jihadist group, al-Muhajiroun. However, it is clear that an understanding of how such groups communicate internally and externally needs to be set in the broader context of research on why organisations in
general transmit ideas, beliefs and values (e.g. for group survival, recruitment, solidarity or coercion), how they go about doing so (formally or informally, top-down or peer-to-peer), what role ideological transmission plays in their goals, and how effective
it is. In the case of extremist groups, the relationship between ideological transmission and radicalisation, recruitment, mobilisation and the move to violence are also important.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

This paper sheds light upon ISIS global-level media operations based on an empirical analysis of 79 official English-language videos using the Braddock and Horgan’s analytical guideline for content analysis. This study results in a quantifiable assessment of videos based on their release dates, language, media centres, duration, musical arrangement, and many other production characteristics, and concludes that ISIS has created a highly sophisticated propaganda apparatus and media operation system with a strong ability to cope with the circumstances and various real-world events that ISIS faces on the ground. Additionally, ISIS’s message contains argumentative moves, and without the knowledge of what these moves are and how they respond to existing dialogues, our understanding of the group’s message in certain dimensions remains partial and incomplete.

This study takes a systemic functional multimodal social semiotic approach to the analysis and discussion of image and text relations in two sets of data. First, patterns of contextualisation of images and text in the online magazines Dabiq and Rumiyah produced by the Islamic extremist organisation which refers to itself as Islamic State (referred to here as ISIS) are examined. The second data set consists of a sample of texts from Western online news and blog sites which include recontextualisations of images found in the first data set. A sample of examples of the use and re-use of images is discussed in order to identify patterns of similarity and difference when images and text are recontextualised. It is argued that the ISIS material tends to foreground the interpersonal metafunction in combination with the textual metafunction (i.e. the stance towards the content and the organisation of the message for this purpose), while the other data set tends to foreground the ideational metafunction (the participants, processes and circumstances of what is being reported). These inferences indicate that further exploration of a larger data set is worth pursuing. Such studies would provide deeper insights helping to distinguish between online material which supports terrorism and that which opposes it, as well as facilitating the further development of multimodal social semiotic approaches to image and text relations.