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The media frequently describes the 2017 Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ rally as a turning point for the alt-right and white supremacist movements. Social movement theory suggests that the media attention and public discourse concerning the rally may have engendered changes in social identity performance and visibility of the alt-right, but this has yet to be empirically tested. The presence of the movement on YouTube is of particular interest, as this platform has been referred to as a breeding ground for the alt-right. The current study investigates whether there are differences in language use between 7142 alt-right and progressive YouTube channels, in addition to measuring possible changes as a result of the rally. To do so, we create structural topic models and measure bigram proportions in video transcripts, spanning approximately 2 months before and after the rally. We observe differences in topics between the two groups, with the ‘alternative influencers’, for example, discussing topics related to race and free speech to a larger extent than progressive channels. We also observe structural breakpoints in the use of bigrams at the time of the rally, suggesting there are changes in language use within the two groups as a result of the rally. While most changes relate to mentions of the rally itself, the alternative group also shows an increase in promotion of their YouTube channels. In light of social movement theory, we argue that language use on YouTube shows that the Charlottesville rally indeed triggered changes in social identity performance and visibility of the alt-right.

While there is growing research on radicalisation and its countermeasures, in the context of Bangladesh, there is a paucity of academic studies on the role of social media in the radicalisation of university students. This research addresses the gap by using survey data to examine the online behaviour and social media use of the university-going youth in Bangladesh. The study finds that there is very little distinction between accurate Islamic theological understandings and radical interpretations of Islam among university-going youth, and there is a proliferation of social media content that tell tales of subjugation of Muslims since the inception of Islam. Many (geopolitical) conflicts are seen by the youth as a continuation of the narrative of Western imperialism. The research identifies the core of the dissonance and argues that the idea of Muslim subjugation stems from sociocultural influences and is exacerbated by social media use.

The Philippines is one of the countries worst affected by terrorism in the world, ranking as the ninth most affected country in the 2019 Global Terrorist Index. The country has long been investing in its counterterrorism apparatus and there have been some signs that the Philippines might introduce legislation that targets online terrorist content. This is to be understood in the context of a growing internet penetration rate and increased use of social media (+8.6% in 2019-2020), coupled with growing concerns for how terrorists use the internet in the country.

Our primary research question was whether memes and codewords, private or fringe online forums, and hybrid real-world/online militia—the three characteristic tactics that support outbreaks of extremist violence for both Jihadi and Boogaloo extremism—are also prevalent in anti-fascist and anarcho-socialist groups. To analyze the use and prevalence of memes and other coded language and activity, we performed analyses on over ten million social media comments ranging from mainstream platforms (such as Twitter) to fringe online forums on Reddit. Throughout the research, we examined whether the same extremist themes and actions that are characteristic of both Jihadi and Boogaloo extremists—themes such as violent revolution, martyrdom, and having a utopian narrative, and actions such as terror attacks—are also found in extremist groups espousing anti-fascism and anarcho-socialism.

The objective of this research is to analyze the potential use of strategic communication, and specifically, strategic brand management and online communications directed to a foreign target by the Islamic State (IS). For this purpose, a review of official the IS online media releases was carried out to determine if they reflect characteristics, components, or tools of strategic communication. In this pursuit, a content analysis of a purposive sample of 381 events—photographs, infographics, English written content, and videos—were applied using two independent judges. Statistically relevant results substantiate claims that the IS uses communication strategies and tactics. Descriptive and inferential statistics point out that Delegitimize Opponents, Utopia-Religion, and Military are the three most commonly used themes, in line with the reported IS identity. Also the IS uses breadth of contents, targets, media outlets, and formats, showing content and social media communications such as in online communication. As far as the authors are aware, it is the first content analysis from a strategic communication perspective used to interpret potential branding by the IS. This study is timely, important and lends credibility to the use of communication and marketing terminology by terrorist experts, as well as bridging brand management and strategic communication and terrorism identifying potential targets, messages, channels and tools for counter arguing and positioning.

We have collected over 30M messages from the publicly available /pol/ message boards on 4chan and 8chan, and compiled them into a model of toxic language use. The trained word embeddings (±0.4GB) are released for free and may be useful for further study on toxic discourse or to boost hate speech detection systems: textgain.com/8chan.