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This article looks at two periods in the history of white supremacy in New Zealand: the short-lived explosion of skinhead groups in the 1990s, and the contemporary rise of the internet-driven alt-right. It looks at the similarities and differences between the two groups, looking at style, symbols, ideology, and behaviour. It looks at the history of these two movements in New Zealand and compares the economic and social factors that contributed to their rise, in particular how the different social class of members produced groups with near-identical ideology but radically different presentation and modes of action.

Taking as reference a cost-benefit analysis of cyberterrorism published in 2004 by Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, this article briefly reviews what happened in the last 15 years in cyberterrorism research, what was correctly forecast, what was wrong and what may happen in the future. Some of the analyses published in during this period have been accurate, indicating that terrorists would use the Web and then social media for supporting operations in financing, recruiting and, especially “propaganda” (information operations), instead of wasting resources in ineffectual cyberattacks against critical infrastructures. The same analyses, however, did not appreciate enough how successful information operations by terrorist groups would have been. Overall, the approach, research methods, findings and forecasting have been quite valid and fruitful and thus they can represent a solid foundation on which scholars of (cyber)terrorism may base their future research.

Social Media has become an important source for information about people and real-world events. Its importance is driven largely by the enormous number of people generating and updating content in Social Media platforms. In this report, we measure the extent to which we can accurately measure the salience of topics/concepts that might be of interest to an analyst, and evaluate whether concepts like positive and negative sentiment can be meaningfully extracted from Social Media content. As a test case, we examined Twitter content generated by female users who are sympathetic to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The basic technique proposed here can be developed further to create a more fine-grained exanimation of Social Media content.

The ISD Germany study on the extreme right-wing use of Telegram serves as a complementary text to the “Escape routes” report. In it, the research team examined links to other platforms, which were shared on the controversial messenger service and were disseminated in the channels of right-wing extremists, right-wing radicals and conspiracy ideologues in the German-speaking world. The main scope of this research was on smaller platforms that do not fall under the deletion obligation of the NetzDG. Links to larger platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter were also analysed, given that the collected data set contained almost twice as many links to these platforms than to those not fully covered by the NetzDG.

For this report, the ISD research team collected 659,110 messages from 238 public channels from the extreme right, radical right, Reichsbürger:innen and conspiracy ideology spectrum between 1 January and 12 September 2021. From these messages, 371,988 links were extracted, leading to 8,252 domains. The ISD Germany researchers examined domains that were shared more than 15 times and identified social networks and platforms.

Extremists, such as hate groups espousing racial supremacy or separation, have established an online presence. A content analysis of 157 extremist web sites selected through purposive sampling was conducted using two raters per site. The sample represented a variety of extremist groups and included both organized groups and sites maintained by apparently unaffiliated individuals. Among the findings were that the majority of sites contained external links to other extremist sites (including international sites), that roughly half the sites included multimedia content, and that half contained racist symbols. A third of the sites disavowed racism or hatred, yet one third contained material from supremacist literature. A small percentage of sites specifically urged violence. These and other findings suggest that the Internet may be an especially powerful tool for extremists as a means of reaching an international audience, recruiting members, linking diverse extremist groups, and allowing maximum image control.

While the messaging tactics of extremist organizations have been studied by researchers, little attention has been devoted to understanding how alternative multimodal communications can enable resistance to polarizing content. This article takes as case studies three grassroots youth arts projects that deploy multimodal resources to educate and build resilience: Build Solid Ground, Jamal al-Khatib and Loulu. The projects won awards at the Horizon 2020 Building Resilience to Violent Extremism and Polarisation (BRaVE) Fair, which was hosted by the Berlin-based intercultural organization Cultures Interactive and took place via Zoom in November 2020. In the pandemic context of increased time spent online, polarization, and growing social and structural vulnerability in which young people face uncertain futures, these projects have been selected for their ability to build channels of communication that support pro-social resilience.