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VOX-Pol Blog post.

The Policy Brief and accompanying Guidance Note on utilizing online data to prevent violent extremism and hate speech apply the lessons learned from UNDP practitioners working on Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) across seven country offices by undertaking pilot projects that collect, analyse and apply online data to their programming. The Policy Brief outlines the major structural, technical, and ethical challenges faced by the practitioners, analyses relevant existing policy frameworks, and explores the potential of human rights-compliant data driven methods to inform PVE programming by offering policy considerations and recommendations to decision-makers. The Guidance Note offers an overview of key processes, tools, and resources for practitioners to consider when utilizing online data for PVE and addressing hate speech. It promotes risk management as an inherently enabling process for enhancing the evidence base for PVE programming.

The purpose of this status report is to create an overview of the challenges related to right-wing and left-wing extremism in Denmark. The report will form part of a more comprehensive mapping launched partly with a view to concretising and targeting the preventive effort. The present report is based on existing and ongoing research in the area. It is a concrete and fact-based report which aims to identify where in present-day Denmark extreme political problems exist – and what kind of issues the Danish society is facing as a result of this. The report is not a mapping or an exhaustive account of the right-wing and left-wing extremist environments, but rather an attempt to establish a knowledge base which may serve as a foundation for such an investigation. Thus, the report reflects existing research on political extremism in Denmark, which is still relatively limited in scope. Consequently, the report also reflects the researcher‟s own observations and analyses of current developments in political extremism. Furthermore, the future mapping will be based on a quantitative investigation.

The role of the internet in radicalizing individuals to extremist action is much discussed but remains conceptually and empirically unclear. Here we consider right-wing and jihadist use of the Internet – who posts what and where. We focus on extremist content related to radicalization to violent action, and argue that victim videos and jihad videos are particularly powerful in moving individuals to radical action. We interpret these two kinds of video as complementary parts of the kind of mobilization frame studied by social movement theorists. Finally we consider various kinds of government effort to control extremist content on the Internet.

Scholarship has highlighted the rise of political influencer networks on YouTube, raising concerns about the platform’s propensity to spread and even incentivize politically extreme content. While many studies have focused on YouTube’s algorithmic infrastructure, limited research exists on the actual content in these networks. Building on Lewis’s (2018) classification of an “alternative influencer” network, we apply structural topic modeling across all text-based autocaptions from her study’s sample to identify common topics featured on these channels. This allows us to gauge which topics appear together and to trace politicization over time. Through network analysis, we determine channel similarities and evaluate whether deplatformed channels influenced topic shifts. We find that political topics increasingly dominate the focus of all analyzed channels. The convergence of culture and politics occurs mostly about identity-driven issues. Furthermore, more extreme channels do not form distinct clusters but blend into the larger content-based network. Our findings illustrate how political topics may function as connective ties across an initially more diverse network of YouTube influencer channels.