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Digital platforms enabled the disturbing rise of domestic extremism, culminating with the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Militia groups use social media networks to plan operations, recruit new members, and spread anti-democracy propaganda, a new Digital Citizens Alliance (Digital Citizens) and Coalition for a Safer Web (CSW) investigation has found.

Purpose – This chapter demonstrates the power that Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (or the “GAFAM”) exercise over platforms within society, highlights the alt-right’s use of GAFAM sites and services as a platform for hate, and examines GAFAM’s establishment and use of hate content moderation apparatuses to de-platform alt-right users and delete hate content. Approach – Drawing upon a political economy of communications approach, this chapter demonstrates GAFAM’s power in society. It also undertakes a reading of GAFAM “terms of service agreements” and “community guidelines” documents to identify GAFAM hate content moderation apparatuses. Findings – GAFAM are among the most powerful platforms in the world, and their content moderation apparatuses are empowered by the US government’s cyber-libertarian approach to Internet law and regulation. GAFAM are defining hate speech, deciding what’s to be done about it, and censoring it. Value – This chapter probes GAFAM’s hate content moderation apparatuses for Internet platforms, and shows how GAFAM enable and constrain the alt-right’s hate speech on their platforms. It also reflexively assesses the politics of empowering GAFAM to de-platform the alt-right.

This project aims to map right-wing extremism in Victoria through the lens of gender. It begins from the premise that there is an underexplored connection between antifeminist sentiment and far-right extremist sentiment. It does this by focusing on select Victorian-based online groups that have an anti-feminist and far-right profile. The project also works with stakeholders who work in the areas of gender and family violence, to gain insight into their practices and experiences.

This report aims to provide a first look into Irish far-right activity on the messaging app, Telegram, where the movement is operating both as identifiable groups and influencers, and anonymously-run channels and groups.

The report looks at the activity across 34 such Telegram channels through the lens of a series of case studies where content posted on these channels resulted in real life consequences. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, the report examines the tactics, language and trends within these channels, providing much-needed detail on the activity of the Irish far-right online.

Online forums such as 4chan and 8chan have grown in notoriety following a number of high-profile attacks conducted in 2019 by right-wing extremists who used their “/pol” boards (dedicated to “politically incorrect” discussions). Despite growing academic interest in these online spaces, little is still known about them; in particular, their similarities and differences remain to be teased out, and their respective roles in fostering a certain farright subculture need to be specified. This article therefore directly compares the content and discussion pace of six different /pol boards of “chan” forums, including some that exist solely on the dark web. We find that while these boards constitute together a particular subculture, differences in terms of both rate of traffic and content demonstrate the fragmentation of this subculture. Specifically, we show that the different /pol boards can be grouped
into a three-tiered architecture based upon both at once how popular they are and how extreme their content is.

This article maps mechanisms by which online social media activities may contribute to right-wing political violence. High-impact studies on the wave of right-wing and racist violence in the 1990s and early 2000s established that mass media discourse on immigrants and previous violent incidents had a significant influence on the prevalence of radical right violence. This link was captured by Koopmans’s and Olzak’s notion of discursive opportunities. However, this was before the dominance of online social networks and social media, which changed the media landscape radically. We argue for broadening and refining the operationalization of the concept of discursive opportunities in social movement studies as well as including in our theoretical models new mechanisms brought about by the new online media. In relation to radical right and anti-immigrant mobilizations in Sweden in the 2010s, we elaborate and exemplify three mechanisms through which activities on social media may affect the incidence of violence: a) having an increasingly co-produced discursive opportunity structure, b) making inter-group dynamics in movement groups and networks trans-local, and c) sharing (rare) practical information and co-ordinating activities.