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The current crises in Syria has led to a number of Britons travelling abroad to fight with groups such as Isis. Capitalising on this growth, Isis are now increasingly fighting an online cyber war, with the use of slick videos, online messages of hate and even an app that all aim to radicalise and create a new generation of cyber jihadists. These modern day tools are helping Isis spread their propaganda and ideology to thousands of online sympathisers across the world. Indeed, the group has actively been using social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to recruit new would be members. This is being done through images and the streaming of violent online viral videos filmed and professionally edited that are targeting young and impressionable people. Portraying a glamorised and ‘cool’ image, Isis fighters are beginning to act as the new rock stars of global cyber jihad. The Internet therefore is becoming the virtual playground for extremist views to be reinforced and act as an echo chamber. This study analysed 100 different Facebook pages and 50 Twitter user accounts which generated over 2050 results and helped the author create a typology of seven key behaviour characteristics and motivations. The findings in this study confirmed the author’s original hypothesis, i.e. online hate is being used by groups such as Isis for a variety of reasons such as recruitment and propaganda. Moreover, this material is coordinated and controlled by Isis as a means for publishing and sending out key messages.

This article seeks to propose a valuable frame for understanding which processes, either cognitive or practical, take part in the making of a terrorist act within the frame of the onlife region. A term recently coined, onlife, refers to the interacting/indistinguishable domain of online and offline world: this is the environment where today’s global terrorism/extremism flourishes. This region of complexity and the phenomena that entails can valuably explored through the General System Theory (GST). In the first part of the paper how global terrorism is changing, moving into cyber terrorism, at the light of the GST, according to recent theoretical achievements in the field is described in detail. The second part will explore a case study of onlife terrorism perpetrated in New Zealand, in order to focus the passage from the ‘possible’ idea of making a massacre to its effective performance, from onlife radicalization to the onlife event (a livestreamed attack filmed by the author) – through a deliberate use of the internet. At this point, the author will be able to come back to the question posed before, sketching some insights that might be valuable for cyber terrorism as well as for GST, especially for what concerns systemic processes within the moral domain.

In this briefing, we document a recently formed apocalyptic militia ideology which, through the use of memes—coded inside jokes conveyed by image or text—advocates extreme violence against law enforcement and government officials. Termed the ‘boogaloo’, this ideology self-organizes across social media communities, boasts tens of thousands of users, exhibits a complex division of labor, evolves well-developed channels to innovate and distribute violent propaganda, deploys a complex communication network on extremist, mainstream and dark Web communities, and articulates a hybrid structure between lone-wolf and cell-like organization. Like a virus which awakens from dormancy, this meme has emerged with startling speed in merely the last 3–4 months.

The Report you are about to read, “Cyber Swarming: Memetic Warfare and Viral Insurgency,” represents a breakthrough case study in the capacity to identify cyber swarms and viral insurgencies in nearly real time as they are developing in plain sight. The result of an analysis of over 100 million social media comments, the authors demonstrate how the “boogaloo meme,” “a joke for some, acts as a violent meme that circulates instructions for a violent, viral insurgency for others.” Using it, like turning off the transponders on 9/11, enables the extremists to hide in plain sight, disappearing into the clutter of innocent messages, other data points. It should be of particular concern, the authors note, for the military, for whom “the meme’s emphasis on military language and culture poses a special risk.”

Because most of law enforcement and the military remain ignorant of “memetic warfare,” the authors demonstrate, extremists who employ it “possess a distinct advantage over government officials and law enforcement.” As with the 9/11 terrorists, “they already realize that they are at war. Public servants cannot afford to remain ignorant of this subject because as sites, followers, and activists grow in number, memes can reach a critical threshold and tipping point, beyond which they can suddenly saturate and mainstream across entire cultures.” This Report is at once an urgent call to recognize an emerging threat and a prescription for how to counter it. As such, it offers that rarest of opportunities: the chance to stop history from repeating itself.

This book highlights cyber racism as an ever growing contemporary phenomenon. Its scope and impact reveals how the internet has escaped national governments, while its expansion is fuelling the spread of non-state actors. In response, the authors address the central question of this topic: What is to be done? Cyber Racism and Community Resilience demonstrates how the social sciences can be marshalled to delineate, comprehend and address the issues raised by a global epidemic of hateful acts against race. Authored by an inter-disciplinary team of researchers based in Australia, this book presents original data that reflects upon the lived, complex and often painful reality of race relations on the internet. It engages with the various ways, from the regulatory to the role of social activist, which can be deployed to minimise the harm often felt. This book will be of particular interest to students and academics in the fields of cybercrime, media sociology and cyber racism.