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The amount of uploaded extremist propaganda on the internet is increasing. In particular, right-wing extremist as well as Islamic extremist groups take advantage of the opportunities presented by the internet to spread their ideas to worldwide masses. Both tackle in-group specific topics and address their audiences in their respective political, national or religious identities. Several factors, such as higher levels of authoritarian value orientations and threatening life situations (such as existential threats or psychological uncertainty) have been found to shape people’s reactions towards radical groups as well as to propaganda. The current study investigated whether the response to extremist propaganda videos (namely, aversion felt for the video and the perceived persuasiveness of the video) is shaped by an individual’s authoritarian attitudes and psychological uncertainty and whether this is a global process or in-group specific. Further, it considered the effects of exposure to extremist propaganda on the identification with one’s in-group. In a laboratory experiment, German students were confronted with a right-wing extremist and an Islamic extremist video after manipulating their level of uncertainty (high vs. low levels of psychological uncertainty).  The results confirmed that the interaction between authoritarianism and psychological uncertainty affected the evaluation of right-wing extremist videos addressing participants’ national in-group. Under conditions of uncertainty, authoritarianism predicted less aversion and a higher persuasiveness of these videos. Further, psychological uncertainty increased the identification with participants’ German nationality, irrespective of authoritarian attitudes. Notably, the effect was in-group bound: The same effect was not found for Islamic extremist propaganda referring to a religious out-group. The results are discussed regarding the potential of propaganda to foster behavioral intentions and engagement in extremist groups in specific threatening situations.

This book deals with the psychological effects of extremist propaganda videos. It particularly asks the question how young adults in Germany respond to right- wing as well as Islamic extremist videos which can be found on the Internet today. This is not a book about terrorism, but about the potential conditions which might facilitate a climate of receptivity for radical messages in a young mass audience with diverging cultural and educational background and different attitudes and values.

Confrontation with radical online content has been empirically linked to the facilitation of radicalization processes. Therefore, building a presence of information about potential prevention of radicalization through an online campaign may be particularly relevant to limit the activities and appeals of radical actors. In this study, we thus examine the effectiveness of campaign material focused on cognitive biases (i.e., when people’s cognitive processes of information are systematically distorted). We test the success of the campaign material with respect to three campaign objectives: Building (1) knowledge about biases, (2) confidence to recognize biases, and (3) awareness and relevance of the issue. We conducted an online-experiment with adolescents (N = 223) comparing a control group (no exposure to the campaign material) to (A) a group that watched the developed campaign videos and (B) a group that watched the videos and took a self-assessment quiz. This comparison aims at testing how different levels of interactivity affect the three campaign objectives. The results suggest that the campaign materials increased knowledge about cognitive biases, but did not affect adolescents’ confidence in recognizing biases and the perceived relevance of learning about biases.

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Although many social media users have reported encountering hate speech, differences in the perception between different users remain unclear. Using a qualitative multi-method approach, we investigated how personal characteristics, the presentation form, and content-related characteristics influence social media users’ perceptions of hate speech, which we differentiated as first-level (i.e. recognizing hate speech) and second-level perceptions (i.e. attitude toward it). To that end, we first observed 23 German-speaking social media users as they scrolled through a fictitious social media feed featuring hate speech. Next, we conducted remote self-confrontation interviews to discuss the content and semi-structured interviews involving interactive tasks. Although it became apparent that perceptions are highly individual, some overarching tendencies emerged. The results suggest that the perception of and indignation toward hate speech decreases as social media use increases. Moreover, direct and prosecutable hate speech is perceived as being particularly negative, especially in visual presentation form.

Terror attacks are followed by public shock and disorientation. Previous research has found that people use social media to collectively negotiate responses, interpretations, and sense-making in the aftermath of terror attacks. However, the role of ideologically motivated discussions and their relevance to the overall discourse have not been studied. This paper ad-dresses this gap and focuses specifically on the far-right discourse, comparing it to the general public Twitter discourse following the terror attack in Hanau in 2020. A multi-method ap-proach combines network analysis and structural topic modelling to analyse 237,000 tweets. We find responsibility attribution to be one of the central themes: The general discourse pri-marily voiced sympathy with the victims and attributed responsibility for the attack to far-right terror or activism. In contrast, the far right – in an attempt to reshape the general narra-tive – raised a plethora of arguments to shift the attribution of responsibility from far-right activism towards the (political) elite and the personal circumstances of the shooter. In terms of information sharing and seeking, we demonstrate that new information was contextualised differentially depending on the ideological stance. The results are situated in the scientific dis-course concerning differences in social media communication ensuing terrorist attacks.