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VOX-Pol Blog post.

The certification of the 2020 election drew a substantial crowd of far-right extremists, with 13% of individuals arrested for crimes committed at the Capitol on January 6th having ties to militia groups. Even before the 2020 election, a 2019 report highlighted the increasing popularity of QAnon conspiracy theories among militia members, a trend which only grew more prevalent as the COVID-19 pandemic brought together a collection of extremist actors. During and following the 2020 election, militia members incorporated QAnon election fraud conspiracies as a central belief, and these conspiracies served as the main mobilizing factor driving militia members to the Capitol on January 6th. This paper explores why QAnon 2020 election conspiracies appealed so strongly to QAnon-adhering militia members. It further examines connections between QAnon 2020 election conspiracies and existing ideological foundations within militias, as well as how the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated and cemented these convergences.

Before, during, and after the 2020 election, online QAnon communities latched onto conspiracies of a “deep state” interfering in the 2020 election to steal Donald Trump’s election win. In this study of QAnon and the militia-sphere, QAnon 2020 election fraud conspiracies are defined as conspiracies emerging from QAnon communities claiming a group of actors within the government interfered in the election. These conspiracies include the beliefs that “middle-of-the-night dumps of fake mail-in ballots [swung] red states to blue” and “Republican votes had been changed or thrown out thanks to foreign plots, complex CIA vote-harvesting programs, and the machinations of a truly evil election administrator–the voting-machine company Dominion.” QAnon’s 2020 election fraud conspiracies took root within far-right communities fiercely loyal to Donald Trump, but other underlying factors within QAnon also appealed more broadly to militias.

The project used the grounded theory-inspired software, “Delve,” to insert transcripts from official court documents from the Department of Justice, video clips published by news outlets, news articles, publicly available social media posts, and public interviews with QAnon-adhering militia members arrested for crimes on January 6th. These quotes were then coded within the transcripts based on their reflection of militia ideology, QAnon language and conspiracies, the 2020 election, and other ideas more broadly found within the far-right. This paper explores three prevailing categories within the data: government corruption, apocalypticism, and defense. Analysis of these categories suggests that QAnon appeals to QAnon-adhering militia members because it aligns with existing foundational militia concepts and conspiracies. Additionally, while the pandemic accelerated QAnon’s appeal to militia members, the 2020 election cemented this trend. This paper assesses that, in the future, QAnon’s growing presence within the militia-sphere will increase convergences between militias and other far-right groups, as well as draw individuals from the mainstream into the militia-sphere.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

The Internet is a transformative technology that terrorists are exploiting for the spread of propaganda and radicalizing new recruits. While al-Qaeda has a longer history, Islamic State is conducting a modern and sophisticated media campaign centered around online social networking. This article introduces and contextualizes the contributions to this Special Issue by examining some of the ways in which terrorists make use of the Internet as part of their broader media strategies.

The seven articles in this special issue were selected from those delivered at a series of workshops undertaken by the European Commission H2020-funded Building Resilience Against Violent Extremism (BRaVE) Project in 2020–2021. Understanding polarization and (violent) extremism as distinct, interlinked, phenomena, the collected articles ask how online platforms can be mobilised to disrupt and reframe ideologies underpinning polarising and extremist messaging. To what extent can social media platforms serve as critical resources that contribute to building pro-social resilience? And, how can we build on what has been effective so far in terms of building online resilience, including what else might social media platforms and their users do to enhance what has already been found to be effective?

This thesis aimed to address these limitations by developing a cross-platform analysis framework for online-hate researchers to gain a clearer understanding of the dynamics of the global hate ecosystem. More specifically, the designing of this framework involved examining the main functionalities of existing online-hate analysis frameworks, and the extent to which they address cross-platform hate. The strengths and limitations of these approaches then informed the functional requirements of the cross-platform analysis framework. To demonstrate how the framework can provide novel insights into online-hate research, this thesis also details its application to various case studies, including online hate from white supremacy-supporting users and environments spread during the 2020 US election and the COVID-19 pandemic.