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This essay adopts a critical rhetorical perspective attuned to affect to investigate white nationalist rhetoric on Stormfront, a popular white nationalist message board. My analysis illuminates how Stormfront attempts to appeal to mainstream white audiences by resisting normative expectations and affects articulated with white supremacy and (re)constructing white nationalism as a formation of white racial consciousness articulated with communal belonging, common sense, and pride. On Stormfront, affect is mobilized discursively to challenge colorblindness, construct rhetorical distance between white nationalism and white supremacy, and strategically negotiate white (dis)comfort with direct discourse on race to compel affective investments in white nationalism.

Several incidents of mass violence in 2019 were preceded by manifestoes posted to deep Web social media sites by their perpetrators. These sites, most notably 4chan and 8chan, are buried in the deep Web, away from the neutralizing effects of broad public discourse. Many of the posts to these sites reference earlier extremist incidents, and indeed the incidents themselves mimic aspects of previous attacks. Building on previous research, this paper examines these deep Web social media sites. Through an analysis of traffic and posts, we confirm that these sites often act as a self-reinforcing community of users encouraging each other to violence, and we map a statistically significant rise in post volume; on these sites immediately following terrorist attacks.

Non-profits, as well as the media, have hypothesized the existence of a radicalization pipeline on YouTube, claiming that users systematically progress towards more extreme content on the platform. Yet, there is to date no substantial quantitative evidence of this alleged pipeline. To close this gap, we conduct a large-scale audit of user radicalization on YouTube. We analyze 330,925 videos posted on 349 channels, which we broadly classified into four types: Media, the Alt-lite, the Intellectual Dark Web (I.D.W.), and the Alt-right. According to the aforementioned radicalization hypothesis, channels in the I.D.W. and the Alt-lite serve as gateways to fringe far-right ideology, here represented by Alt-right channels. Processing 72M+ comments, we show that the three channel types indeed increasingly share the same user base; that users consistently migrate from milder to more extreme content; and that a large percentage of users who consume Alt-right content now consumed Alt-lite and I.D.W. content in the past. We also probe YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, looking at more than 2M video and channel recommendations between May/July 2019. We find that Alt-lite content is easily reachable from I.D.W. channels, while Alt-right videos are reachable only through channel recommendations. Overall, we paint a comprehensive picture of user radicalization on YouTube.

This chapter illustrates that online and offline measures to counter violent extremism in Australia have targeted jihadism over other forms of extremism. With attention to the open and intensifying state of far-right extremism in Australia, it advocates for increased attention to this situation. It contends that, given the recursive nature of online extremism and its political and international dimensions, material disseminated by far-right and jihadist groups should be addressed from a comparative perspective.

In recent years, there has been an intensification of international extremist violence linked in varying degrees to Internet-facilitated radicalisation. This has related to, among other things, a growth in prevalence of politically violent actors, including far-right and jihadist collectives. Extreme political polarisation, sometimes termed the ‘hyper-tribalism’ of those with violent or extreme views, is to some extent reinforced by these entities’ participation in social media. Radicalisation to terrorism is also arguably facilitated by the architectures of social media platforms, which comprise of personalisation algorithms and the re-mediating functions of ‘likes’, ‘shares’, and ‘re-tweets’ (Sunstein 2009; Pariser 2011; Wood 2017). This chapter reflects on characteristics of social media that can be perceived to encourage violent extremism and terrorism, and legal, security, and technological measures that have been developed internationally to prevent and counter online violent extremist expression. With reference to recent terrorism-related trends, it also highlights a disparity in legal measures to address far-right hate speech (Gelber & McNamara 2016; Davey et al. 2018), relative to thoseused to police and restrict online activity related to jihadism (Conway et al. 2018).

In diesem Beitrag werden auf Basis von staatsanwaltschaftlichen Verfahrensakten, Daten der Programmierschnittstelle von Twitter (API) und frei zugänglichen Online-Inhalten Konstitutions- und Kommunikationsdynamiken einer rechtsextremistischen Gruppierung analysiert, von der mehrere Mitglieder 2014 wegen der Bildung einer kriminellen Vereinigung verurteilt wurden. Es wird rekonstruiert und analysiert, wie die jungen Erwachsenen über verschiedene Kommunikationskanäle innerhalb ihrer Gruppe und nach außen kommunizieren, wie sich interne und externe Selbstdarstellungen unterscheiden. Dabei wird aufgezeigt, welchen Stellenwert Gewalt und Gewaltbefürwortung in dieser Gruppe besitzen, wie sich die Mitglieder als Individuen und als Kollektiv definieren, Geltung verschaffen und von anderen abgrenzen wollen. Da für die Kommunikation der Gruppe nicht zuletzt Social Media eine Rolle spielen, wird auch diskutiert, inwiefern Mechanismen digitaler, netzwerkbasierter Kommunikation, wie die sogenannte Filterblase, für den Radikalisierungsprozess relevant sind.