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This article presents the results of a case study of the online community Russian Nationalism, one of the most popular Russian nationalists’ online communities on VKontakte in 2012–2016. The article aims to find out where network leaders and common members of nationalist online groups closed on the Russian Internet go and in which thematic communities they continue their activity. Russian Nationalism members’ personal profiles and friendly links on VKontakte were used as data sources. The metrics of social network analysis were used to study Russian Nationalism’s network structure. The study showed that the ban of a massive extreme right nationalist online group leads to an increase in the number of smaller shelter groups that retain their ideological basis, but abandon the clearly expressed hate speech; members of a banned nationalist group flow to groups whose content is both close (militaristic, cultural, and historical) and far (everyday) to the extreme right. The content of the latter can transform in line with the nationalist ideology. The case study of Russian Nationalism shows a high potential for diffusion of extreme right nationalist ideas in the Russian network space, which manifests in their ability to penetrate other thematic and ideological areas of public discourse.

Propaganda is a common element in many, if not all, terrorist incidents. Objectives are usually to instil fear in the target population but may also include winning approval from associates and inspiring new adherents. The advent of social media has greatly expanded opportunities for achieving these objectives. The attacks on worshipers in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 15 March 2019 resulting in the murder of 51 people and the live streaming of the attack on Facebook were met with responses from governments in New Zealand, France and Australia that sought international cooperation in finding effective counter-measures to the propaganda value of the attacks. Australia’s ambitious regulatory approach is problematic when considered in an international context particularly in relation to the need to take account of free speech guarantees. However, since it recognises the need for international solutions in this area, there are opportunities to explore other ways of achieving its objectives.

As the debate on whether Hamas should be designated a terrorist organization intensifies across Europe and North America, policymakers and practitioners seek to identify the core principles that unify the group and its ideology. This paper contributes to this discussion by examining how Hamas uses Twitter to frame its narrative to English-speakers around the world. From March 2015 until November 2019, when its account was suspended from Twitter, Hamas operated an English-language Twitter handle under the name @HamasInfoEn. Using thematic content analysis to explore the first 2,848 tweets sent by Hamas in English—between March 2015 and March 2018—this paper explores the socio-political and religious narratives that lay at the core of Hamas’s online public diplomacy throughout its first three years on Twitter. Since its entrance into politics in 2006, some academics argue that Hamas has increasingly sought to distance itself from acts of terrorism and legitimize its actions as a governing actor, thereby seeking to carve out a place for itself in the international community. This study presents a nuanced understanding of how Hamas represents itself internationally, to better understand where the group is going, and how to best counter its narratives.

This is a formal commentary, responding to Matthew Curran Benigni, Kenneth Joseph, and Kathleen Carley’s contribution, “Online extremism and the communities that sustain it: Detecting the ISIS supporting community on Twitter”. This brief review reflects on the ethics of big data research methodologies, and how novel methods complicate long-standing principles of research ethics. Specifically, the concept of the “data subject” as a corollary, or replacement, of “human subject” is considered.

The electoral success and increased media presence of the Far-Right ideology known as the Alternative Right has catapulted the once marginal fringe movement into popular political discourse. The term Alternative Right is used in contrast to Alt-Right, which is a specific subsection of the broader Alt-Right who are associated with Richard Spencer. This dissertation examines the theories that make up the Alternative Right by addressing the question: How have the divergent political theory traditions of the Alternative Right coalesced into a new reactionary political ideology?The first half of the dissertation defines the Alternative Right and the historical context for the movement. The dissertation defines the Alternative Right by its axioms of the right to difference, the primacy of cultural metapolitics and hierarchical individualism. The second half examines the four major intellectual influences of the Alternative Right: The Techno-libertarians know as the Grey Tribe, NeoReactionary Thought, the European New Right and the American White Nationalists. The dissertation concludes that the divergent political theory of the Alternative Right is unified based on its shared reactionary values, its break from American liberal-conservativism and a consistent focus on the literature of radicalization and critique. The goal of the Alternative Right is a rebirth of racial/gendered consciousness and a new American/European renaissance.

Many researchers, practitioners, and policymakers are concerned about online communities that are known to facilitate violent right-wing extremism, but little is empirically known about these digital spaces in general and the developmental posting behaviors that make up these spaces in particular. In this study, group-based trajectory modeling—derived from a criminal career paradigm—was used to identify posting trajectories found in the open-access sections of the Iron March and Fascist Forge forums, both of which have gained notoriety for their members’ online advocacy of violence and acts of violence carried out by them. Multinomial logistic regression and analysis of variance were then used to assess whether posters’ time of entry into the violent forums predicted trajectory group assignment. Overall, the results highlight a number of similarities and differences in posting behaviors within and across platforms, many of which may inform future risk factor frameworks used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies to identify credible threats online. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this analysis, followed by a discussion of study limitations and avenues for future research.