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This chapter critically analyses the impact of the Internet and associated technology on the rise in terrorist attacks across the US and Europe over the last two decades. To this end, the chapter will be focusing on jihadists’ use of the Internet, yet comparisons will also be made with the radical right. Although there exist certainly differences between the groups, there are also similarities between them, and, in turn, this chapter will address these movements as a collective. The jihadist terrorist organisations that will be analysed in this chapter will include Al-Qaeda and ISIS. The findings reveal that although the Internet has been linked to the preparation and execution of attacks, as this chapter will explore, it is difficult to establish direct cause and effect associations between the Internet and the rise in attacks in Europe and the US.

The far right is notoriously effective in its use of digital media to mobilize people and to build a sense of collective identity around oppositional cultures. Yet, while research has begun to explore far-right groups’ social media hyperlinking activities, relatively little is known about the purposes and communicative functions of this form of communication. By combining social network analysis and qualitative content analysis on Facebook data obtained from 17 PEGIDA and Generation Identity Facebook pages in the period around the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ (2015–2017), this exploratory study investigates the linked source types and their purposes. We find that the groups predominantly link to mainstream media, far-right media and far-right non-institutional groups. While there are great overlaps in the communicative functions and purposes of the links for the two networks, the PEGIDA groups mainly focus on the promotion of political issues, especially around the opposition to third-country (Muslim) immigration, while the GI groups use them for self-promotional purposes. These differences are largely explainable by the groups’ adverse (online) mobilization aims.

America has often developed very impressive methods of waging war and protecting strategic interests, but all too often, its senior leaders are too optimistic about how much those methods can actually accomplish. The heart of U.S. national security challenges today is an ongoing erosion of American influence globally. What the U.S. now requires is a modification of older ideas in ways appropriate for the modern age. The works contained in this edited volume are signposts of a future that America still has time to choose wherein its efforts to safeguard its people and protect its interests can be remade and reforged in ways appropriate and successful in this era of dazzling technologies and enormous global change.

The events surrounding the 2020 U.S. election and the January 6 insurrection have challenged scholarly understanding of concepts like collective action, radicalization, and mobilization. In this article, we argue that online far-right radicalization is better understood as a form of distributed cognition, in which the groups’ online environment incentivizes certain patterns of behavior over others. Namely, these platforms organize their users in ways that facilitate a nefarious form of collective intelligence, which is amplified and strengthened by systems of algorithmic curation. In short, these platforms reflect and facilitate undemocratic cognition, fueled by affective networks, contributing to events like the January 6 insurrection and far-right extremism more broadly. To demonstrate, we apply this framing to a case study (the “Stop the Steal” movement) to illustrate how this framework can make sense of radicalization and mobilization influenced by undemocratic cognition.

With Patrick Crusuis’ 2019 attack that killed twenty-two people in El Paso, Texas, discussions of ecofascism were thrust into mainstream news outlets and magazines. In his manifesto, Crusius described himself as an “ecofascist” seeking to challenge the “environmental warfare” of immigration. His choice of target, a Walmart frequented by Mexican immigrants, reflects this ideological connection between ecological priorities and violent white supremacist ideology. In this paper, the authors provide a review of existing theoretical literature on ecofascism to identify its key characteristics, namely, its Romantic sensibilities, anti-humanism, and mysticism. The authors argue that these features distinguish ecofascism from what other scholars have deemed “far-right ecologisms.” Following this, the authors draw on a larger corpus of data gathered from Twitter and Telegram between November 2019 and November 2020 to identify common themes in ecofascist circles, including the thinkers they frequently cite. The dataset examined shows notable differences in the types of content shared in ecofascist groups compared to the far-right more broadly.

This paper analyzes the meaning of iconography that constitute memes by reviewing a collection of memes propagated on social media related to the Kyle Rittenhouse shooting of protestors in Wisconsin. The authors collected 355 images from 37,774 tweets, supplemented by images found in Facebook groups, militia forums, and right-wing meme repositories related to Kyle Rittenhouse. The paper leads with an introduction to the American “alt-right” movement and the Rittenhouse shootings. The paper’s methodology deconstructs each meme into a set of constituent parts. This provides a process for classifying memes based on their templates, “aesthetic,” branding, events, iconography, and seemingly ambiguous references. This allows researchers to better attribute memes to specific socio-political and cultural groups, analyze the intent of the messaging, and situate memes in the broader knowledge base that, over time, solidifies into its own entity with its own kind of social and political agency.