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The importance of the Internet and social media in politics has been demonstrated in previous years, when terms such as ‘Twitter revolution’ and ‘Facebook revolution’ were used repeatedly for several movements, and now new terms such as ‘digital threat’ and ‘digital Jihad’ are being used by many in similar fashion. In the age of the Internet, the advantages often associated with the democratizing effect of the Internet are creating an atmosphere for different users, such as Daesh. Global propaganda is an important part of Daesh’s activities, and radicalization is one of the realities of our era. Although the impact of the Internet and social media on processes of people’s radicalization remains a highly contested subject and has been one of the most controversial topics during the last decade, the main question is whether the Internet is the main factor in the radicalization of civilians, considering that some politicians and pundits have been discussing this issue over the past few years, or it is more of a communication tool, facilitator and catalyst, pushing people towards radicalization. In this article, I discuss two different approaches to the relationship between technology (online activities in different platforms) and radicalization. This article is part of an ongoing research project.

The process of becoming radicalized and joining extremist groups like Daesh, in countries with a Shi’a majority, such as Iran, is a controversial topic that has not received sufficient attention in the literature. This study examines Daesh’s media content in Farsi and seeks to provide an analysis of Daesh’s main messages, which have the primary objective of profoundly impacting their target audiences in Iran. This study collected data from 16 Iranian members of Daesh to discover how they were radicalized and why they decided to join Daesh. This study seeks to understand whether the media and Daesh’s propaganda are indeed the key reasons behind the radicalization of Daesh’s Iranian members and the creation of others’ perception of their mindsets against Iran and its Shi’a population, and to discover other possible factors that play a role in the radicalization process. While Daesh media and messages hold salience in relation to the Daeshization of some, studying such complex socio-political issues is rooted in an amalgamation of different personal, social, political, economic, and cultural push and pull factors. Such phenomena cannot, therefore, be reduced to only one of the mentioned elements.

Algorithms and especially recommendation algorithms play an important role online, most notably on YouTube. Yet, little is known about the network communities that these algorithms form. We analyzed the channel recommendations on YouTube to map the communities that the social network is creating through its algorithms and to test the network for homophily, that is, the connectedness between communities. We find that YouTube’s channel recommendation algorithm fosters the creation of highly homophilous communities in the United States (n = 13,529 channels) and in Germany (n = 8,000 channels). Factors that seem to drive YouTube’s recommendations are topics, language, and location. We highlight the issue of homophilous communities in the context of politics where YouTube’s algorithms create far-right communities in both countries.

The 2016 US election and the victory of Donald Trump are closely connected to a perceived rise of the far-right in the United States. We build upon public sphere and alternative media theory to discuss the relevance of alternative media for the US (far-)right and whether the election period and the candidate Trump allowed far-right alternative media to establish themselves in the (far-) right networked public sphere. We investigate whether it has come to a convergence of topics between the right and the extreme far-right. We analyze the topics nine right-wing outlets, ranging from Fox News to the Neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, covered in 2015/2016 during the US presidential election. We show through topic modeling of 21,919 articles how Breitbart established itself as a media outlet between the extreme far-right and mainstream right by both covering more extreme and more classic conservative topics. We show through time series clustering how Breitbart and Fox News converged in their coverage of Islam and immigration. Finally, we show through hyperlink analysis that the connection between the far-right and the mainstream right is mostly one-sided; while the alternative outlets link to more established ones, the established outlets mostly ignore the outlets from the far-right.

Most analyses of far-right communication on social media focus on one specific platform, while findings are generalized. In this study, I argue that the far right’s use of social media depends on technology affordances – the linkage between platform design and usage – and, thus, might not always be generalizable. After discussing six affordances – persistence, scalability, replicability, connectivity, searchability, and identifiability – I apply them to studies about the far right on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Telegram in a systematic literature review. I conclude that most research focuses on aspects linked to connectivity, scalability, and replicability, while persistence, searchability, and identifiability are barely researched so far. I further discuss shortcomings and possibilities for future research to consider aspect of technology affordances.

VOX-Pol Blog post.