Online Library

Departing from Jessie Daniels’s 2013 review of scholarship on race and racism online, this article maps and discusses recent developments in the study of racism and hate speech in the subfield of social media research. Systematically examining 104 articles, we address three research questions: Which geographical contexts, platforms, and methods do researchers engage with in studies of racism and hate speech on social media? To what extent does scholarship draw on critical race perspectives to interrogate how systemic racism is (re)produced on social media? What are the primary methodological and ethical challenges of the field? The article finds a lack of geographical and platform diversity, an absence of researchers’ reflexive dialogue with their object of study, and little engagement with critical race perspectives to unpack racism on social media. There is a need for more thorough interrogations of how user practices and platform politics co-shape contemporary racisms.

Chapter in book, ‘Finding the Right Place on the Map’, Jakubowicz & Miklos Sükösd (eds.). The chapter looks at the role of the Internet in the street protests in Hungary in 2006 and examines how the protests played out online. Content analysis of extreme right-wing online media (major websites, news portals, mailing lists, discussion forums and online media in the period between 17 September and 4 November 2006)

Hiding true personality behind a facade is one of the basic
tricks adopted by humans who live double lives for illegal purposes. In
particular terrorists have historically adopted the protocol of a facade
behaviour coupled with a second life consisting mainly in illegal activities
and their planning.
Nowadays a few cases of behaviours that hide a dangerous activity, possibly
illegal, behind an apparently neutral and mean public person, can
be replicated, and sometimes just provided, by a social network pro-
file. Recognizing that a social network profile is fake, in some extreme
cases, a bot, and determining the contour relationships that limit such a
condition is one of the most important weapons for terrorism fight.
In this paper we show that what we name the Spider-man protocol, a
set of behaviour rules that bring to hiding a personality behind a facade,
has several weaknesses, and it is prone to a set of attacks that permit to
detect these behaviours. We provide the description of an experimental
architecture that is used for determining violations of the protocol, and
therefore breaches in the secrecy of the individual protection settled by
the terrorists.

In its offline aspect the broader right-wing movement is comprised of a range of groups and idealogical variances that have traditionally had difficulty coalescing into a coherent movement with broad appeal. In its online aspect, right-wing extremist practice is focused on spreading ideaology, recruiting and radicalization, and building transnational communities.

VOX-Pol Blog post.