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The Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS) continues to use social media as an essential element of its campaign to motivate support. On Twitter, ISIS’ unique ability to leverage unaffiliated sympathizers that simply retweet propaganda has been identified as a primary mechanism in their success in motivating both recruitment and “lone wolf” attacks. The present work explores a large community of Twitter users whose activity supports ISIS propaganda diffusion in varying degrees. Within this ISIS supporting community, we observe a diverse range of actor types, including fighters, propagandists, recruiters, religious scholars, and unaffiliated sympathizers. The interaction between these users offers unique insight into the people and narratives critical to ISIS’ sustainment. In their entirety, we refer to this diverse set of users as an online extremist community or OEC. We present Iterative Vertex Clustering and Classification (IVCC), a scalable analytic approach for OEC detection in annotated heterogeneous networks, and provide an illustrative case study of an online community of over 22,000 Twitter users whose online behavior directly advocates support for ISIS or contibutes to the group’s propaganda dissemination through retweets.

Reciprocal radicalisation is the theory that extremist organisations are connected and feed on one another’s rhetoric and actions to justify violent escalation. Recent empirical work has suggested that reciprocal radicalisation is a good deal more subtle than is often assumed, and is nuanced by organisational, social and political context. This study seeks to apply the theory of reciprocal radicalisation to the far-right digital milieu, an online space conceptualised as underpinning the varying physical manifestations of the far-right. Based on a qualitative thematic analysis of user posts in three far-right web forums, the study concludes that responses to ideologically opposed terrorism within the far-right milieu are often at odds with the assumed radicalising effects of terrorist attacks. While responses were not uniform, for many users in the far-right digital milieu, jihadist terrorism was an obvious and expected result of the wider failures of politics and society. Although there were some calls for violent reprisal, they were juxtaposed by non-violent responses which interpreted jihadist terror as a consequence and sign of societal decadence and political weakness around issues of migration and rights.

We present two studies of online ephemerality and anonymity based on the popular discussion board /b/ at 4chan.org: a website with over 7 million users that plays an influential role in Internet culture. Although researchers and practitioners often assume that user identity and data permanence are central tools in the design of online communities, we explore how /b/ succeeds despite being almost entirely anonymous and extremely ephemeral. We begin by describing /b/ and performing a content analysis that suggests the community is dominated by playful exchanges of images and links. Our first study uses a large dataset of more than five million posts to quantify ephemerality in /b/. We find that most threads spend just five seconds on the first page and less than five minutes on the site before expiring. Our second study is an analysis of identity signals on 4chan, finding that over 90% of posts are made by fully anonymous users, with other identity signals adopted and discarded at will. We describe alternative mechanisms that /b/ participants use to establish status and frame their interactions.

On 15 March 2019, Brenton Tarrant destroyed New Zealand’s perception of its low threat terrorist risk. Security sector practitioners interviewed for this study before 15 March spoke about the challenges of performing counter terrorism roles in that low threat environment. Their perceptions revealed a fear that terrorist attacks occurring overseas, would sooner or later occur in New Zealand. Their roles were complicated by an overarching sense of social, bureaucratic and political complacency toward the threat of terrorism. They perceived legislative inertia, which fettered the powers and resources agencies had to effectively act against the risks they believed were present. Despite these barriers, security sector agencies continued to look for possible emerging threats across a spectrum of risk, but relied on improvised use of existing legislation to manage it. This was more effective against those motivated by militant jihadism, and as Tarrant demonstrated, less so against other threats. Community engagement was needed and successfully achieved, although difficulties were observed which need to be addressed, and the media was perceived as having an undue influence over New Zealand’s security priorities, highlighting the need for a national counter terrorism strategy.

The recent rise of the political extremism in Western countries has spurred renewed interest in the psychological and moral appeal of political extremism. Empirical support for the psychological explanation using surveys has been limited by lack of access to extremist groups, while field studies have missed psychological measures and failed to compare extremists with contrast groups. We revisit the debate over the psychological and moral appeal of extremism in the U.S. context by analyzing Twitter data of 10,000 political extremists and comparing their text-based psychological constructs with those of 5000 liberal and 5000 conservative users. The results reveal that extremists show a lower positive emotion and a higher negative emotion than partisan users, but their differences in certainty is not significant. In addition, while left-wing extremists express more language indicative of anxiety than liberals, right-wing extremists express lower anxiety than conservatives. Moreover, our results mostly lend support to Moral Foundations Theory for partisan users and extend it to the political extremists. With the exception of ingroup loyalty, we found evidences supporting the Moral Foundations Theory among left- and right-wing extremists. However, we found no evidence for elevated moral foundations among political extremists.

Der Rechtsterrorismus ist im digitalen Zeitalter angekommen. Von Christchurch bis El Paso haben sich neue Ausdrucksformen rechter Gewalt etabliert, deren Täter mehr in digitalen Subkulturen als in rechtsextremen Organisationen zu verorten sind. Die radikalisierenden Tendenzen obskurer Online-Communitys geraten somit stärker in den Fokus der Forschung und fordern das Verständnis von rechtem Terror heraus. Wie verändert sich der Rechtsterrorismus also im digitalen Zeitalter? Mit diesem Beitrag möchten wir diese Frage mit dem Verweis auf die Beziehung von digitalen Hasskulturen und rechtsterroristischer Gewalt beleuchten. Wir argumentieren, dass die Analyse der Gewalttaten nicht ohne das Verständnis digitaler Hasskulturen auskommt, die Menschenfeindlichkeit über ironische Kommunikationsformate normalisiert. Aus ihnen heraus bildet sich eine rechtsterroristische Subkultur, die die ambivalenten Erzeugnisse digitaler Kulturen aufgreift und mit gewaltverherrlichenden Inhalten des Neonazismus verbindet, um eines zu erreichen: Menschen zur Gewalt anzuspornen.