Online Library

Far-right groups increasingly use social media to interact with other groups and reach their followers. Social media also enable ‘ordinary’ people to participate in online discussions and shape political discourse. This study compares the networks and discourses of Facebook pages of Western European far-right parties, movements and communities. Network analyses of pages indicate that the form of far-right mobilization is shaped by political opportunities. The absence of a strong far-right party offline seems to be reflected in an online network in which non-institutionalized groups are the most prominent actors, rather than political parties. In its turn, the discourse is shaped by the type of actor. Content analyses of comments of followers show that parties address the political establishment more often than immigration and Islam, compared to non-institutionalized groups. Furthermore, parties apply less extreme discursive practices towards ‘the other’ than non-institutionalized groups.

Widespread Internet use by terrorists had made the prevention of terror attacks increasingly difficult. This Article argues that social media companies, like other corporate entities, should be legally required to institute compliance programs that ferret out and report terrorist activity at the earliest possible opportunity. To this end, the Article proposes text for new legislation that would criminalize social media companies’ failure to discover and release terrorismrelated posts to the government. The authors alternatively suggest borrowing from the white-collar crime arena to secure company assistance in government investigations by granting leniency at sentencing to offending companies. The Article concludes by addressing anticipated constitutional arguments and opposition to the proposed legislative framework.

The increased threat of right-wing extremist violence necessitates a better understanding of online extremism. Radical message boards, small-scale social media platforms, and other internet fringes have been reported to fuel hatred. The current paper examines data from the right-wing forum Stormfront between 2001 and 2015. We specifically aim to understand the development of user activity and the use of extremist language. Various time-series models depict posting frequency and the prevalence and intensity of extremist language. Individual user analyses examine whether some super users dominate the forum. The results suggest that structural break models capture the forum evolution better than stationary or linear change models. We observed an increase of forum engagement followed by a decrease towards the end of the time range. However, the proportion of extremist language on the forum increased in a step-wise matter until the early summer of 2011, followed by a decrease. This temporal development suggests that forum rhetoric did not necessarily become more extreme over time. Individual user analysis revealed that super forum users accounted for the vast majority of posts and of extremist language. These users differed from normal users in their evolution of forum engagement.

Der Beitrag befasst sich mit dem Einfluss des Internets auf Meinungsbildungsprozesse in Gestalt von Radikalisierung Jugendlicher in Deutschland. Dafür wird in einer metaanalytischen Vorgehensweise das Forschungsfeld zu Online-Radikalisierung im deutschen Forschungsdiskurs, ergänzt durch relevante internationale Befunde, genau sondiert und aufgeschlüsselt. Wie sich zeigt, ist das bestehende Wissen dazu äußerst bruchstückhaft; lediglich einzelne Facetten wurden im komplexen Zusammenwirken vieler Faktoren eines Radikalisierungsverlaufs bisher untersucht. Um mehr über die Hintergründe zu Online-Radikalisierung Jugendlicher zu erfahren, besteht die Notwendigkeit eines interdisziplinären und multimethodischen Vorgehens, zu dem insbesondere die Kulturanthropologie mit ihren Methoden und emischen Perspektiven auf lebensweltliche Zusammenhänge einen wichtigen Beitrag leisten kann. Die vorliegende Metaanalyse bietet neben einer theoretischen Fundierung und begrifflichen Einordnung eine strukturierte Statusaufnahme und Auswertung der aktuellen Forschungslandschaft zu der Rolle des Internets auf die Radikalisierung von jungen Menschen. Die Arbeit identifiziert Erkenntnisse und zeigt aktuelle Forschungsdesiderata auf. Die vorliegende Studie bietet somit einen systematischen Überblick über die deutsche Forschungslandschaft und kann als Grundlage für weitere Forschung auf diesem Bereich genutzt werden.

Scholarship has highlighted the rise of political influencer networks on YouTube, raising concerns about the platform’s propensity to spread and even incentivize politically extreme content. While many studies have focused on YouTube’s algorithmic infrastructure, limited research exists on the actual content in these networks. Building on Lewis’s (2018) classification of an “alternative influencer” network, we apply structural topic modeling across all text-based autocaptions from her study’s sample to identify common topics featured on these channels. This allows us to gauge which topics appear together and to trace politicization over time. Through network analysis, we determine channel similarities and evaluate whether deplatformed channels influenced topic shifts. We find that political topics increasingly dominate the focus of all analyzed channels. The convergence of culture and politics occurs mostly about identity-driven issues. Furthermore, more extreme channels do not form distinct clusters but blend into the larger content-based network. Our findings illustrate how political topics may function as connective ties across an initially more diverse network of YouTube influencer channels.

In recent years, the Islamic State terror organization has become notorious for its evil brutality. The brutal nature
of its propaganda (distributed mostly online) inspires Jihadi sympathizers around the world, encouraging them
to use violence against “the enemies of Islam”. This form of violent behavior has also been adopted and imitated
by others – including non-Muslim individuals and groups – regardless of their geographic location, worldview,
religion, ethnicity, or nationality. Drawing from numerous examples, this article illustrates two processes: first,
the “mainstreaming” of beheadings among Jihadists, and second, the imitation of this method (decapitation)
by individuals motivated by other kinds of extremism.