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One of the paradoxical effects of the 7 July bombings in London was to expose the ambivalence in the British government’s attempt to wage war on terror by forcefully prosecuting war against those who resort to jihad abroad, actively participating in coalitions of the willing whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, while affording some of Islamism’s key ideologists and strategists a high degree of latitude in the United Kingdom itself. This indicates a number of contradictions in official policy that simultaneously recognizes the globalized threat from violent Islamic militancy while, under the rubric of multiculturalism, tolerating those very strains of Islamist radicalism, some of which draw upon the interdependent and transnational character of conflict, to render the UK vulnerable to those very same violent forces. Consequently, the British authorities displayed a studied indifference towards this developing transnational phenomenon both during the 1990s and in some respects even after the London bombings. To explore the curious character of the government’s response to the Islamist threat requires the examination of the emergence of this radical ideological understanding and what it entails as a reaction to modernization and secularism in both thought and practice. The analysis explores how government policies often facilitated the non-negotiable identity politics of those promoting a pure, authentic and regenerated Islamic order both in the UK and abroad. This reflected a profound misunderstanding of the growing source and appeal of radical Islam that can be interpreted as a consequence of the slow-motion collision between modernity in its recent globalized form and an Islamic social character, which renders standard western modernization theory, and indeed, the notion of a ‘social science’ itself, deeply questionable.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

The internet offers tremendous opportunities for violent extremists across the ideological spectrum and at a global level. In addition to propaganda, digital technologies have transformed the dynamics of radical mobilisation, recruitment and participation. Even though the jihadist threat has seemingly declined in the West, the danger exists of the internet being an environment where radical messages can survive and even prosper. Against this background, this ISPI report investigates the current landscape of jihadist online communication, including original empirical analysis. Specific attention is also placed on potential measures and initiatives to address the threat of online violent extremism. The volume aims to present important points for reflection on the phenomenon in the West (including Italy) and beyond.

Video sharing platforms like YouTube are increasingly targeted by aggression and hate attacks. Prior work has shown how these attacks often take place as a result of “raids,” i.e., organized efforts by ad-hoc mobs coordinating from third-party communities. Despite the increasing relevance of this phenomenon, however, online services often lack effective countermeasures to mitigate it. Unlike well-studied problems like spam and phishing, coordinated aggressive behavior both targets and is perpetrated by humans, making defense mechanisms that look for automated activity unsuitable. Therefore, the de-facto solution is to reactively rely on user reports and human moderation. In this paper, we propose an automated solution to identify YouTube videos that are likely to be targeted by coordinated harassers from fringe communities like 4chan. First, we characterize and model YouTube videos along several axes (metadata, audio transcripts, thumbnails) based on a ground truth dataset of videos that were targeted by raids. Then, we use an ensemble of classifiers to determine the likelihood that a video will be raided with very good results (AUC up to 94%). Overall, our work provides an important first step towards deploying proactive systems to detect and mitigate coordinated hate attacks on platforms like YouTube.

In the process of shifting far-right ideas from the fringes to the centre of the political spectrum, the alt-right has infiltrated online spaces to mainstream extremist ideas. As part of this process, female alt-right influencers have emerged within various popular social media platforms and fringe outlets, seeking to build credibility for the movement with new audiences. Contrary to previous assumptions about women as harmless adherents of far-right ideology, alt-right women are emerging as “organic intellectuals”, influential in the formation of everyday beliefs and principles in congruence with the tenets of far-right ideology. Their narratives strategically weave far-right ideological discourses, such as the imminent crisis of white identity, with topical matters on lifestyle and well-being. This article examines the rhetoric of online influencers as they shape an ideological space which is contributing to the normalization or mainstreaming of far-right ideas. In doing so, it addresses two questions: How do alt-right female influencers narrate a far-right identity? How do they mainstream white supremacist ideas online? Drawing on new empirical material from a series of far-right podcasts, this article demonstrates that alt-right women strategically construct a “liberated” female identity rooted in femininity, traditionalism and gender complementarity, and problematize feminism and women’s emancipation as constitutive of the crisis facing the white race. It further identifies the presence of an elaborate cultural narrative around white victimhood which alt-right influencers use to mainstream their ideology. To counter the perpetuation of far-right ideas in society, women’s participation in shaping far-right ideology should not remain unaddressed. This article sheds some light on how a small but highly visible group of influencers are actively working to promote a dangerous far-right ideology.

As the debate on whether Hamas should be designated a terrorist organization intensifies across Europe and North America, policymakers and practitioners seek to identify the core principles that unify the group and its ideology. This paper contributes to this discussion by examining how Hamas uses Twitter to frame its narrative to English-speakers around the world. From March 2015 until November 2019, when its account was suspended from Twitter, Hamas operated an English-language Twitter handle under the name @HamasInfoEn. Using thematic content analysis to explore the first 2,848 tweets sent by Hamas in English—between March 2015 and March 2018—this paper explores the socio-political and religious narratives that lay at the core of Hamas’s online public diplomacy throughout its first three years on Twitter. Since its entrance into politics in 2006, some academics argue that Hamas has increasingly sought to distance itself from acts of terrorism and legitimize its actions as a governing actor, thereby seeking to carve out a place for itself in the international community. This study presents a nuanced understanding of how Hamas represents itself internationally, to better understand where the group is going, and how to best counter its narratives.