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This report demonstrates how terrorists and extremists have utilised the Darknet to mask their communication and propaganda efforts, to recruit and radicalise, and to gain material benefits such as illicit goods, including, but not limited to, weapons and fraudulent documents. In addition, this report notes the growing tendency of these individuals to utilise cryptocurrencies for transactions and fundraising, enabling them to evade detection by law enforcement entities.

This study focuses on jihadist online communication in 2014–2018 from the perspective of Finland. In particular, it examines and analyses the visibility of Finland and persons connected to Finland in jihadist online communication and investigates the types of content persons who are or were living in Finland have produced and disseminated content on different online platforms and channels. The report focuses on jihadist material that was openly available online during this period. It also contains a section describing the development of jihadist online communication more generally, thus helping to put observations in a broader international context.

A better understanding of how support evolves online for undesirable behaviors such as extremism and hate, could help mitigate future harms. Here we show how the highly irregular growth curves of groups supporting two high-profile extremism movements, can be accurately described if we generalize existing gelation models to account for the facts that the number of potential recruits is timedependent and humans are heterogeneous. This leads to a novel generalized Burgers equation that describes these groups’ temporal evolution, and predicts a critical influx rate for potential recruits beyond which such groups will not form. Our findings offer a new approach to managing undesirable groups online – and more broadly, managing the sudden appearance and growth of large macroscopic aggregates in a complex system – by manipulating their onset and engineering their growth curves.

A popular stereotype is that women will play more minor roles than men as environments become more dangerous and aggressive. Our analysis of new longitudinal data sets from offline and online operational networks [for example, ISIS (Islamic State)] shows that although men dominate numerically, women emerge with superior network connectivity that can benefit the underlying system’s robustness and survival. Our observations suggest new female-centric approaches that could be used to affect such networks. They also raise questions about how individual contributions in high-pressure systems are evaluated.

The Workers’ Party of Social Justice (DSSS) is the strongest right-wing extremist party in the Czech Republic with about two percent of votes in the last parliamentary election. It profiles itself as the »defender of ordinary people« against »the corrupt political elite«, especially the parties in power, and tries to make use of government corruption scandals to discredit the democratic political spectrum as a whole.

The main strategy to raise support for the extreme right is to highlight criminal cases comprising members of the Roma population: »Anti-gypsyism«, where a number of local citizens who are not among the party’s main support take part in various protest events focused on Roma criminality, is becoming the main area of contact of DSSS with mainstream forces.

Despite its poor showing in elections, the extreme right in Czech Republic attained a certain degree of influence due to media coverage of its activities. Mainstream political parties respond to it and often borrow its anti-gypsy rhetoric, while neither the state nor the non-governmental sector has proven to be very effective in solving the so-called Roma issue.