Online Library

How does the far right operate today? This volume presents a unique critical survey of the online and offline tactics, symbols and platforms that are strategically remixed to stake national and transnational cultural claims by contemporary far-right groups in Europe and North America. Featuring short, accessible analyses by an international range of expert scholars, policy advisors and activists, the book offers a plurality of answers to practical and theoretical questions about how and why the Internet has been crucial to emboldening extreme nationalisms in these regions and what counter-cultural approaches civil societies should develop in response.

During the 2016 election, a new term entered the mainstream American political lexicon: “alt-right,” short for “alternative right.” Despite the innocuous name, the alt-right is a white-nationalist movement. Yet it differs from earlier racist groups: it is youthful and tech savvy, obsessed with provocation and trolling, amorphous, predominantly online, and mostly anonymous. And it was energized by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. In Making Sense of the Alt-Right, George Hawley provides an accessible introduction and gives vital perspective on the emergence of a group whose overt racism has confounded expectations for a more tolerant America.

To prevent and counter the spread of illegal hate speech online, in May 2016, the Commission agreed with Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube a “Code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech online”. The implementation of the Code of Conduct is evaluated through a regular monitoring exercise set up in collaboration with a network of organisations located in the different EU countries. Using a commonly agreed methodology, these organisations test how the IT companies are implementing the commitments in the Code.

Von Christchurch bis Halle: Wie sich der Rechtsterrorismus neu erfindet
Radikale und extreme Rechte vernetzen sich längst nicht mehr nur durch geheime Treffen. Sie sind ganz offen im Internet unterwegs, über alle nationalen Grenzen hinweg. Ihr Umgang mit der digitalen Infrastruktur ist versiert. Ihre Mittel: Strategiepapiere, Guerilla-Marketing und organisierte Hasskampagnen. An die Stelle straff organisierter Gruppen treten immer öfter lose Netzwerke. Viele radikalisieren sich, ein Teil von ihnen greift zur Gewalt, einige von ihnen töten. Karolin Schwarz, Journalistin und Expertin für rechte Propaganda im Internet, zeigt, wie sich Rechtsextremismus organisiert und eine neue Form des globalen Terrorismus entsteht, dessen Gewalt zum Ausbruch kommt. Parallel tragen rechtspopulistische Regierungen und totalitäre Regime Lüge und Hetze über das Netz nach Europa – eine unheilvolle Allianz. Schwarz macht deutlich: Gesellschaft, Justiz und Politik sind keineswegs wehrlos. Dafür müssen sie rechte Strategien und Technologien aber kennen und verstehen.

With the spread of social networks and their unfortunate use for hate speech, automatic detection of the latter has become a pressing problem. In this paper, we reproduce seven state-of-the-art hate speech detection models from prior work, and show that they perform well only when tested on the same type of data they were trained on. Based on these results, we argue that for successful hate speech detection, model architecture is less important than the type of data and labeling criteria. We further show that all proposed detection techniques are brittle against adversaries who can (automatically) insert typos, change word boundaries or add innocuous words to the original hate speech. A combination of these methods is also effective against Google Perspective – a cuttingedge solution from industry. Our experiments demonstrate that adversarial training does not completely mitigate the attacks, and using character-level features makes the models systematically more
attack-resistant than using word-level features.

Thought-provoking and timely, this book addresses the increasingly widespread issue of online political hatred in Europe. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it examines both the contributions of new technologies, in particular social networks, to the rise of this phenomenon, and the legal and political contexts in which it is taking place. Giovanni Ziccardi also evaluates possible remedies for the situation, including both legal and technological solutions, and outlines the potential for a unified European framework to counter the spread of hatred online.