Online Library

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.

This article examines how far-right groups advance political agendas through digital platforms, specifically by embedding reactionary ideology within health and wellness discourse. Our investigation concerns the “Barbarian Right” subculture on X (formerly Twitter), where reactionary content is often intertwined with wellness messaging. Using social network analysis of 42 accounts identified through digital ethnography, we mapped the structure of this community and identified key influencers. Subsequent semiotic discourse analysis revealed ideological practices and their relationship to platform affordances. Our findings reveal a small number of prominent accounts, supported by alternative media outlets that dominate this space. These accounts primarily deliver health advice strategically interspersed with white nationalist messaging. This research offers empirical insights into the growing alignment between far-right and wellness communities, shedding light on potential radicalization pathways and recruitment strategies of the dissident right.

Involuntary celibates (incels) are individuals who feel alienated from society because of their perceived inability to attract women. They share a narrative which valorises violence as a means to restructure society according to misogynistic ideals. Since promoting a radical misogynistic ideology through violence is legally prohibited and socially unacceptable, it is necessary for incels to hide out online where virtual mediums promise anonymity. Virtual relationality (VR) allowed unorganised individuals with a shared grievance against mainstream societal values to develop into a secretive collective. VR means that individuals connect in chatrooms and internet forums where they exchange interpretations of a narrative which presents their social situation as oppressive and dehumanising. They blame ‘modernist’ values and social practices for their ills and share perspectives of how they should interact with the world. These perspectives frequently justify or condone acts of physical violence. Relating in the virtual world gave these individuals’ shared grievances a sense of coherence and allowed for an amplification of the influence of their violent acts by affirming the value of extremist ideas. VR turned individuals without consistent preferences and a unifying organisational medium into a ‘hydra’ with a felt global presence. The virtual nature of incels complicates responses by 1) enabling the collective to have global reach, 2) allowing it to function without an organised body or institutional structures, 3) making it difficult to identify individual incels, and 4) making it difficult to tell when incels pose a genuine security threat. These realities make it crucial to develop a fuller understanding of how the incel collective functions online.

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.

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.