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While the radical right is relatively successful on social media, only a fraction of its supporters become activists offline. Why do some individuals become offline activists in radical right organizations, while others prefer to limit their support to online spaces? Following an inductive analysis of interviews with activists and supporters of a radical right organization, this study points to the importance of going beyond classical explanations for activism by focusing on the impact of, and relationship between, group identification and stigma for mobilization. It shows that activists who identify with the organization and consider it stigmatized are motivated to participate in protest actions to speak out in front of this perceived injustice. By contrast, supporters who question the organization’s legitimacy in the face of stigma engage with the organization on social media and are motivated by a desire to keep a low profile and to avoid being openly associated with stigmatized actors.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

The opportunities afforded by the Internet greatly overshadow the challenges. While not forgetting this, we can nevertheless still address some of the problems that arise. Hate speech online is one such problem. But what exactly is hate speech online, and how can we deal with it effectively? As with freedom of expression, on- or offline, UNESCO defends the position that the free flow of information should always be the norm. Counter-speech is generally preferable to suppression of speech. And any response that limits speech needs to be very carefully weighed to ensure that this remains wholly exceptional, and that legitimate robust debate is not curtailed. A typology of responses is elaborated in this study.

Following Sahana Udupa and Matti Pohjonen’s (2019) invitation to move the debate beyond a normative understanding of hate speech, this article seeks to build a foundation for conceptual and empirical inquiry of speech commonly considered deviant and disturbing. It develops in three stages. It first maps the public lives of terms that refer to online vitriol and how they have been used by different communities of researchers, politicians, advocacy groups, and national organizations. Second, it shows how different types of “haters” have been interpreted as parts of “swarms” or “armies,” depending on whether their violent potential emerges around critical incidents or whether they respond to longer-term strategies through which communities and their leaders tie their speech acts to explicit narratives. The article concludes by locating “extreme speech” within this broader conceptual tapestry, arguing that the paternalistic the gaze that characterizes a lot of research on online hate speech is tied to what Chantal Mouffe has referred to as the “moralization of politics,” a phenomenon that cannot be matched by responses that are themselves moral.

We are delighted to announce the launch of the final report of the Mechachal project, one of first academic studies to contextually examine how hate speech emerges and disseminates in social media.

Focusing on Ethiopia, and in collaboration with Addis Ababa University, the research team examined thousands of comments made by Ethiopians on Facebook during four months around the time of the country’s general election. Hate speech’ –defined as statements to incite others to discriminate or act against individuals or groups on grounds of their ethnicity, nationality, religion or gender – was found in just 0.7% of overall statements in the representative sample. The paper says the findings may have wide implications for the many countries trying to address growing concerns about the role played by social media in promoting radicalisation or violence.

Ethiopia represented an exceptional case study because of its distinct languages, which allowed the research team to gain a realistic sample of the overall online debates focused on one country. The research team analysed Facebook statements made by Ethiopians, both in their homeland and abroad, in the run-up to and just after the general election on 24 May 2015. Fans or followers, rather than people with any real influence online, were found to be mainly responsible for the violent or aggressive speech that appeared on Facebook pages in the sample.

It appears these individuals use Facebook to vent their anger against more powerful sections of society. Around 18% of total comments in the sample were written by fans or followers compared with 11% of comments made by highly influential speakers (the owners of web pages). One fifth (21.8%) of hostile comments were grounded in political differences, only slightly higher than the overall average of 21.4% of all conversations containing hostile comments. Religion and ethnicity provoked fewer hostile comments (10% and 14% of overall comments in sample respectively).

In the past, far-right aggression predominantly focused on national settings and street terror against minorities; today, however, it is increasingly embedded in global networks and acts within a strategic framework aimed at revolution, targeting the liberal order as such. Ideologically combining antisemitism, racism, and anti-feminism/anti-LGBTQI, adherents of this movement see modern societies as degenerate and weak, with the only solution being a violent collapse that they attempt to accelerate with their actions. The terrorist who attacked the synagogue and a kebab shop in Halle, Germany, in October 2019 clearly identified with this transnational community and situated his act as a continuation of a series of attacks inspired by white supremacy in the past decade. The common term ‘lone wolf’ for these kinds of terrorists is in that sense a misnomer, as they are embedded in digital ‘wolf packs’.

Although this movement is highly decentralized and heterogeneous, there are interactive processes that connect and shape the online milieu of extremists into more than the sum of its parts, forming a structure which facilitates a certain degree of cohesion, strategic agency, and learning. This paper uses the model of collective learning outside formal organizations to analyze how the revolutionary accelerationist right as a community of practice engages in generating collective identities and knowledge that are used in the service of their acts of death and destruction.