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Seit 2018 nahm mit den Anschlägen von Pittsburgh, Christchurch, Poway, El Paso, Bærum und Halle eine neue Form des Rechtsterrorismus an Fahrt auf, dessen Modus Operandi aus drei untrennbar miteinander verbundenen Akten besteht: Erstens, ein rassistisches Schriftstück auf einem Imageboard posten, das rechtsextreme Inhalte in nihilistischen Memes verpackt. Zweitens, eine Zielgruppe mit Waffengewalt angreifen, dabei möglichst viele Menschen töten und die Tat live im Internet streamen. Drittens, zur Imitation aufrufen, indem alle Informationen zur Tat leicht zugänglich gemacht werden, damit eine breite Öffentlichkeit (aus Sympathie oder Sensationslust) Videosequenzen und Bilder der Tat reproduziert und das Werk der Täter veredelt.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was much discussion about the democratic and anti-democratic implications of the Internet. The latter particularly focused on the ways in which the far-right were using the Internet to spread hate and recruit members. Despite this common assumption, the American far-right did not harness the Internet quickly, effectively or widely. More recently, however, they have experienced a resurgence and mainstreaming, benefitting greatly from social media. This chapter examines the history of their use of the Internet with respect to: (1) how this developed in response to political changes and emerging technologies; (2) how it reflected and changed the status of such movements and their brand of hate; and (3) the relationship between online activity and traditional methods of communication.

The alt-right is an online subculture marked by its devotion to the execution of a racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic politics through trolling, pranking, meme-making, and mass murder. It is this devotion to far-right politics through the discordant conjunction of humor and suicidal violence this article seeks to explain by situating the movement for the first time within its constitutive online relationships. This article adds to the existing literature by viewing the online relationships of the alt-right through the genealogy of propaganda. Through situating the alt-right alongside the genealogy of propaganda, the article offers new insights into the social isolation, increasingly extreme social and political positions, nihilism, and violence that have emerged within the alt-right. The article concludes by applying the lessons of the alt-right for online organizing across the political spectrum and argues that a class-based politics of the left is an important part of countering the rise of the alt-right.

Previously theorised as vehicles for expressing progressive dissent, this article considers how political memes have become entangled in the recent reactionary turn of web subcultures. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s work on political affect, this article examines how online anonymous communities use memetic literacy, memetic abstraction, and memetic antagonism to constitute themselves as political collectives. Specifically, it focuses on how the subcultural and highly reactionary milieu of 4chan’s /pol/ board does so through an anti-Semitic meme called triple parentheses. In aggregating the contents of this peculiar meme from a large dataset of /pol/ comments, the article finds that /pol/ users, or anons, tend to use the meme to formulate a nebulous out-group resonant with populist demagoguery.

This chapter scrutinises how it is that anonymous chan culture engage with the alt-histories of esoteric fascism. To this end, the chapter begins with a brief description of the ideas of the mid-century Italian esotericist ‘Baron’ Julius Evola (arguably the single most significant intellectual influence esoteric fascism), before moving on to discuss anon’s vernacular interpretation of these ideas. In order to assess the ‘real world’ danger posed by these alt-histories, the essay concludes with a brief analysis of the particularly disturbing case of the Christchurch mass shooter whose manifesto was replete with anonymous chan culture and whom appears to have imagined himself as a holy warrior engaged fighting against ‘the great replacement’ of Western culture by alien outsiders—a notion which connects extreme-right terrorists with the discourse of new-right populist politicians and intellectuals.

In recent years, the increasing propagation of hate speech on social media and the urgent need for effective counter-measures have drawn significant investment from governments, companies, and empirical research. Despite a large number of emerging scientific studies to address the problem, a major limitation of existing work is the lack of comparative evaluations, which makes it difficult to assess the contribution of individual works. This paper introduces a new method based on a deep neural network combining convolutional and gated recurrent networks. We conduct an extensive evaluation of the method against several baselines and state of the art on the largest collection of publicly available Twitter datasets to date, and show that compared to previously reported results on these datasets, our proposed method is able to capture both word sequence and order information in short texts, and it sets new benchmark by outperforming on 6 out of 7 datasets by between 1 and 13% in F1. We also extend the existing dataset collection on this task by creating a new dataset covering different topics.