Online Library

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

Departing from Jessie Daniels’s 2013 review of scholarship on race and racism online, this article maps and discusses recent developments in the study of racism and hate speech in the subfield of social media research. Systematically examining 104 articles, we address three research questions: Which geographical contexts, platforms, and methods do researchers engage with in studies of racism and hate speech on social media? To what extent does scholarship draw on critical race perspectives to interrogate how systemic racism is (re)produced on social media? What are the primary methodological and ethical challenges of the field? The article finds a lack of geographical and platform diversity, an absence of researchers’ reflexive dialogue with their object of study, and little engagement with critical race perspectives to unpack racism on social media. There is a need for more thorough interrogations of how user practices and platform politics co-shape contemporary racisms.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

Chapter in book, ‘Finding the Right Place on the Map’, Jakubowicz & Miklos Sükösd (eds.). The chapter looks at the role of the Internet in the street protests in Hungary in 2006 and examines how the protests played out online. Content analysis of extreme right-wing online media (major websites, news portals, mailing lists, discussion forums and online media in the period between 17 September and 4 November 2006)

This project by GNET looks at the user journeys of individuals who enter and participate in the online spaces of extremist communities. A user journey here refers to the distinct path a user may follow to reach their goals when accessing and using an online space belonging to extremist communities.

User journeys are particularly important in offering insights into the rationale and motivations of users on the one hand, and to the inner workings of extremist online communities on the other. This is vital for understanding their goals and objectives.

In selecting the ideologies for this project, we drew upon extremist communities – rather than extremist and terrorist organisations or groups – including those actors that participate in the extremist milieu and share ideas but do not necessarily operate in concert. These ideologies include those of formal and well‐defined extremist organisations of White supremacist and anti‐government extremist groups in the United States, supporter networks of Islamic State (IS), and looser communities of extremist actors, including accelerationists, incels and chan site members who operate on shared platforms, congregating around common beliefs without the connection of formal membership.

This project is a response to the growing interest in understanding how individuals enter and participate in online spaces of extremist communities. A core goal of the project was to understand the role of algorithms in leading users to extremist communities, including the changes in algorithmic recommendations that lead users to more extreme content online. However, examining these changes proved impossible due to the precautions taken by the expert contributors to the project, such as the use of separate technology and VPNs throughout their research.

The project also highlights the distinct posting behaviour and operational security protocols of different groups, usually along ideological lines.

Hiding true personality behind a facade is one of the basic
tricks adopted by humans who live double lives for illegal purposes. In
particular terrorists have historically adopted the protocol of a facade
behaviour coupled with a second life consisting mainly in illegal activities
and their planning.
Nowadays a few cases of behaviours that hide a dangerous activity, possibly
illegal, behind an apparently neutral and mean public person, can
be replicated, and sometimes just provided, by a social network pro-
file. Recognizing that a social network profile is fake, in some extreme
cases, a bot, and determining the contour relationships that limit such a
condition is one of the most important weapons for terrorism fight.
In this paper we show that what we name the Spider-man protocol, a
set of behaviour rules that bring to hiding a personality behind a facade,
has several weaknesses, and it is prone to a set of attacks that permit to
detect these behaviours. We provide the description of an experimental
architecture that is used for determining violations of the protocol, and
therefore breaches in the secrecy of the individual protection settled by
the terrorists.