Online Library

As a social media platform, Instagram has a strong influence on youth culture, identity, and perceptions of the world, with the application serving not only for youth to follow accounts that are aspirational but also for entertainment and identity building through memes. Meme accounts that are explicitly conservative and that espouse white supremacist, hateful ideology and subsequently, identity, are incredibly prevalent. Media serve as powerful institutions for the socialization of youth, and content on the platform reveals that memes are serving as building blocks of ideological meaning. This study conducted a discourse analysis of the memes and content circulated by the alt-right affiliate movement the ‘Proud Boys,’ which is being sold to young men as a fraternity-like organization to celebrate ‘Western ideals’. Proud Boys operate on an ideology that consists of both symbolic and physical violence, and the popularity of these groups is growing. Using Bourdieu’s work on language as a framework, this article is an exploration to their recruitment and world-building practices on Instagram using memes and will be necessary to understand the movement, and to gain further insight into how memes are being used as propaganda.

In this report, we present an empirical study from Twitter on how Islamist extremists and right wing extremists are active on Twitter. Our study was based on ethnographic, automatic text and network analyses of data from German female and male Twitter accounts.

Although the subject of extreme right virtual community formation is often discussed, an online ‘sense of community’ among right-wing extremists has not been systematically analysed. It is argued that to study this phenomenon and to understand its backgrounds and function, the offline and online experiences and actions of those involved need to be taken into account. For this purpose, qualitative data has been collected on the web forum ‘Stormfront’, supplemented by extensive online interviews with eleven of its members. It is demonstrated that those experiencing stigmatization in offline social life regard the forum as a virtual community that functions as an online refuge, whereas those who – because of special circumstances – do not experience offline stigmatization do not display an online sense of community. It is concluded that offline stigmatization underlies virtual community formation by Dutch right-wing extremists. Because this mechanism may have broader significance, additional hypotheses for future research are formulated.

The Internet has become the principal platform for the dissemination and mediation of the ideology of Islamic movements, ranging from purist (non-violent) to politically engaged movements to Jihadi networks. Certainly in intelligence and security circles the Internet is considered the single most important venue for the radicalization of Muslim youth. On the other hand the Internet is seen as a means for people to transcend ethnic and religious divisions that are pervasive in other spheres of life. In this paper the author argues that both premises seem to result from a lack of understanding of the relationship between online and offline realities and still more from the difficulty of ascertaining the extent to which websites influence wider audiences and users. In order to understand the reception of Internet messages the local context and the way global narratives are appropriated in the local context, should be taken into account. My argument will be based on my empirical study of the practices of Muslim youth with regard to the Internet; I will explore how they act simultaneously as performers and observers in these virtual spaces.

Any intervention in the violent acts of terrorist groups requires accurate differentiation among the groups themselves, which has largely been overlooked in their study beyond qualitative work. To explore the notion of terrorist group differentiation, the online communication of six violent groups were collected: Al-Nusrah Front, al-Qa’ida Central, al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula, Hamas, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and Taliban. All six groups embedded their ideology in digitised documents that were shared through multiple online social networks and media platforms in attempts to influence individuals to identify with their beliefs. The way these groups constructed social roles for their supporters in their ideology was proposed as a novel way to differentiate them and key term extraction was used to find important terms referenced in their communication. Experimental classification was devised to find the highest-ranking roles capable of prediction. Role terms produced high accuracy scores across experiments differentiating the groups (95%CI: 95–98%), with varying inter-group and intra-ideological differences emerging from authority-, religion-, closeness-, and conflict-based social roles. This suggests these constructs possess strong predictive potential to separate terrorist groups through nuanced expressions observed in their communication behaviour and advances our understanding of how these groups deploy harmful ideology.

The Arab Spring raised high expectations for political freedom, especially for situations in which the rapid development of ICT intersects with political oppression and rebellion, as was the case in Mali, West Africa. In 2012 the country’s northern part fell into the hands of ‘rebels’ and jihadists were on the rise. This article tries to understand the development of political agency in relation to the unprecedented access to new ICT of the Fulani nomads and urbanites in the Mopti region (Hayre), who engage increasingly with new actors and networks present in the war zone: ‘rebels’ and jihadists; the diaspora from that region; and the journalistic and academic communities who visit the region. We argue that political agency is emerging in the relation between (newly appearing) information networks in both the on- and off-line worlds. These networked societies are embedded in cultural and social historical specificities of the Sudan-Sahel zone in conflict.