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ISIS has seemingly been successful in mobilizing advocates from heterogenous backgrounds. Such diversity is symptomatic of the organization’s heavy investment in strategic messaging and identity construction to gain legitimacy. This study examined the multimodal discursive properties of ISIS’s narrative in its communique, Dabiq. It undertook a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of the representation of in-group and out-group actors implementing Van Leeuwen’s socio-semantic inventory. The results showed that the in-group members are deliberately specified, hence foregrounded, and at the same time, the diversity among them is highlighted as an inseparable hallmark of ISIS’s movement. Therefore, no racial, geographical, or cultural line was drawn apropos its participants to ensure more inclusion. Conversely, the perceived enemies are framed as diverse yet homogeneous entities textually through generic references and addressing them collectively regardless of their potential dissimilarities and visually by categorizing them through religiously, culturally, or nationally distinguishable features. It acts as a legitimation tactic by which striking against one enemy justifies striking against others. The combination of these strategic multimodal framing tasks serves as a propaganda tool for ISIS to intensify polarisation, enhance in-group participation, and ultimately facilitate mobilization.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

Incels (“involuntary celibates”) are online communities of young men, broadly aligned by anti-feminism, concern over an inability to form sexual relationships with women, and a strong negative focus on their own appearance. Incels have been linked to violent misogyny and several mass killings. Using critical discourse analysis on data from nine different incel online forums, this article explores how incels discussed the Plymouth shooting in August 2021, often reported as an incel attack, looking at the discourses which are invoked to justify or delegitimize violence. As well as violent rhetoric, our research also pays attention to anti-violent rhetoric in incel communities, an area not yet discussed in the literature regarding incels, but which may be invaluable to those hoping to address the issue of incel violence. Our findings identify significant differences in the way the shooting is discussed across different incel forums, and reveal that both pro and anti-violence discourses frequently invoke lookism and mental health to justify victimhood.

This small-scale study brings attention to the way the news media cover the enabling role of computer technology and social media in coalescing online communities focused on the hatred of women and the promotion of violence. While that aggression is ultimately and typically carried out against both women and men, it is specifically misogyny which underlies it. The way that the broader public receives information about incels – involuntary celebates with misogynistic and often violent tendencies – and their atrocities is through the news media, both traditional and internet. This study complements related research on misogynistic language used by social media sites like Reddit by examining the news media’s language in coverage of incels’ behavior associated with sexual aggression. The research applies qualitative procedures (textual analysis) and a critical feminist framework to identify the gender relations associated with incels online in news for the years 2018 and 2019.

This Comment addresses issues unique to potentially terrorist content targeted by Internet platforms’ Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) efforts. It focuses in particular on Islamist extremism, though some of the analysis may be generalized to other contexts.