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The emergence and actions of the so-called Islamic State
of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/ISIS) has received widespread
news coverage across the World, largely due to their capture
of large swathes of land across Syria and Iraq, and the
publishing of execution and propaganda videos. Enticed by
such material published on social media and attracted to the
cause of ISIS, there have been numerous reports of individuals
from European countries (the United Kingdom and France
in particular) moving to Syria and joining ISIS. In this paper
our aim to understand what happens to Europe-based
Twitter users before, during, and after they exhibit pro-ISIS
behaviour (i.e. using pro-ISIS terms, sharing content from
pro-ISIS accounts), characterising such behaviour as radicalisation
signals. We adopt a data-mining oriented approach
to computationally determine time points of activation (i.e.
when users begin to adopt pro-ISIS behaviour), characterise
divergent behaviour (both lexically and socially), and quantify
influence dynamics as pro-ISIS terms are adopted. Our
findings show that: (i) of 154K users examined only 727 exhibited
signs of pro-ISIS behaviour and the vast majority of
those 727 users became activated with such behaviour during
the summer of 2014 when ISIS shared many beheading
videos online; (ii) users exhibit significant behaviour divergence
around the time of their activation, and; (iii) social homophily
has a strong bearing on the diffusion process of proISIS
terms through Twitter.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

This study investigates how visual manipulation is employed on the Facebook page of a far-right party; and whether manipulation evokes different forms of engagement from Facebook users. The study takes as a case the Facebook page of the British National Party (BNP), which has recently been censored from the social media platform. It therefore provides a rare insight in the visual practices of the party’s online political communication. A manual coding of 342 images into factual, funny, fallacious or fabricated content finds that completely fabricated information in images is rare. However, most images do contain information that is presented in a fallacious or misleading manner. The results show how deliberate manipulated images evoke more engagement in the form of comments and more negative emotional responses than images that present information in a factual or funny manner.

Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory was a shock for feminist scholars, yet it was no surprise to his legion of supporters in alt-right digital spaces. In this essay, we analyze one of the online forums that helped propel Trump to electoral victory. Drawing on social movement concepts and an analysis of 1,762 posts, we show how leaders of the forum the “Red Pill” were able to move a community of adherents from understanding men’s rights as a personal philosophy to political action. This transition was no small endeavor. The Red Pill forum was explicitly apolitical until the summer before the 2016 election. During the election, forum leaders linked the forum’s neoliberal, misogynistic collective identity of alpha masculinity to Trump’s public persona and framed his political ascendance as an opportunity to effectively push back against feminism and get a “real” man into the White House. We argue that while previous research shows the importance of alt-right virtual spaces in creating and maintaining racist collective identities, we know very little about how men conceptualize gender in ways that inform their personal and political action—and this is to our detriment. We conclude the essay by arguing that feminists need to understand how men cultivate extreme personal and political identities in online forums so that we can better understand how new technologies are used to move individuals from the armchair to the streets.

This paper reviews online gender-based violence (OGBV) as existing within a continuum of (on- and offline) violence, emphasising the connections with different extremist ideologies, including the dissemination of terrorist and violent extremist content (TVEC). It aims to prioritise a gender perspective in responding to TVEC so that social media platforms can better intervene in and mitigate misogynistic pathways to radicalisation that can begin (or be reinforced) online. The discussion recognises that the mitigation of OGBV and online pathways to radicalisation requires a whole-of-society and whole-of-government approach. Whilst there are steps that governments and civil society can and should take, such as overseeing and enforcing emerging regulatory frameworks and voluntary commitments, this paper and its recommendations emphasise the role and actions of platforms.

VOX-Pol Blog post.