Online Library

ISD has analysed 100 websites linked to the far right and white supremacist communities to establish which tools, services or platforms are most commonly in use. This small sample is intended only as a snapshot of the broader landscape, but nonetheless
reveals some interesting trends which are worthy of discussion.

The independent Commission for Countering Extremism has published a legal review, to examine whether existing legislation adequately deals with hateful extremism.

The French Digital Council has been given a mandate to examine Article 9 of the bill on scaling up
counter-terrorism provisions. These provisions amend Article 6 of the Act of 21 June 2004 on confidence
in the digital economy (LCEN) by providing for the administration to block websites containing speech
and/or images constituting incitement to terrorism or in defence of terrorism. They also extend the scope
of the notification tools that technical service providers are bound to use.
The French Digital Council has held fifteen interviews with terrorism experts (sociologists, journalists and
association representatives), specialised lawyers and judges, civil society representatives, intelligence
agency members and digital professionals (full list available in the appendix) to be able to deliver as fully
informed an opinion as possible.

The purpose of this article is to inform the debate about strategies and options for countering online radicalization within the U.S. domestic context. Its aim is to provide a better understanding of how the Internet facilitates radicalization; an appreciation of the dilemmas and tradeoffs that are involved in countering online radicalization within the United States; and ideas and best practices for making the emerging approach and strategy richer and more effective. It argues that online radicalization can be dealt with in three ways. Approaches aimed at restricting freedom of speech and removing content from the Internet are not only the least desirable, they are also the least effective. Instead, government should play a more energetic role in reducing the demand for radicalization and violent extremist messages—for example, by encouraging civic challenges to extremist narratives and by promoting awareness and education of young people. In the short term, the most promising way for dealing with the presence of violent extremists and their propaganda on the Internet is to exploit their online communications to gain intelligence and gather evidence in the most comprehensive and systematic fashion possible.

This article is concerned with the distinction between acceptable race talk in social media and organised, extreme or ‘frozen’ racism which is considered hate speech and removed. While in the literature this distinction is used to point to different variants, styles and mutations of racism, in social media platforms and in European regulatory frameworks it becomes policy. The empirical part of the article considers this distinction drawing upon a series of posts following a stabbing incident in a small Irish town, which organised Twitter accounts sought to connect to terrorism. The empirical analysis examines the tweets of those accounts and the comments left on the Facebook page and website of one of the main Irish online news outlets. The analysis shows few if any differences between the two, concluding that there is a blending of supremacist and everyday, ambient racist discourses. This blending indicates the operation of a transnational contagion, given the shared vocabularies and discourses. It further problematises the distinction between ‘illegal hate speech’ and ‘acceptable race talk’, and throws into question the principle underlying both the policies of social media as well as the European efforts to de-toxify the digital public sphere.

Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-lockdown movements sparked concerns about online extremism escalating into real-world violence. This study takes the Australian anti-lockdown movement to explore extremist discourse in Australia, as it contained several, overlapping and interacting extremisms. This study explores the labelling of these protests as extreme and examines the interplay between individuals, ideologies and discourse. Understanding the definitions and labels of extremism is fundamental for identifying and countering potential threats, as it distinguishes harmful rhetoric from extremist discourse and enables precise, informed interventions. A qualitative close reading revealed that while Australian anti-lockdown discourse contained crisis narratives and group antagonisms, it did not consistently meet the structural definition of extremism. This is partly due to the problem of coding violence, which lies in the lack of a clear comparative threshold to determine whether a discursive claim, rhetoric, or cultural reference signifies violence or violent intent. While not meeting the structural definition of extremism, there was evidence of specific structural attributes that logically precede extremism and the emergence of violence. By reconceptualizing extremism as a temporal dynamic, this research explores the relationship between discursive and violent extremism, shedding light on the complexities of extremist movements and their social impact.