Online Library

ISD has analysed 100 websites linked to the far right and white supremacist communities to establish which tools, services or platforms are most commonly in use. This small sample is intended only as a snapshot of the broader landscape, but nonetheless
reveals some interesting trends which are worthy of discussion.

Popular music research has explored digital technologies’ potential for democratizing music consumption, distribution, and production. This article, however, focuses on the anti-democratic implications of digitalization for popular music by exploring discussions of music in 1,173 posts in 6 Alt-Right forums, from 2010–2018. It demonstrates that, first, owing to algorithmic architecture, interpretations of musical politics are mutually reinforcing in these spaces. Second, a large degree of musical “omnivorousness” in these forums is both a feature of contemporary far-right strategy and a consequence of digitalization. Third, by articulating “reactionary democratic” principles through music criticism, these movements more easily evade regulation.

The Internet and online platforms have become a useful instrument for modern terrorists’ recruitment. Numerous studies explored the online recruitment of Jihadi groups and especially of the Islamic State (ISIS) that managed to recruit over 40,000 fighters from as many as 90 countries. Yet, these studies, focusing mainly on the online platforms and the appeals used, lacked a theoretical framework that can serve the search for the factors explaining process and its success. In this chapter we suggest that the notion of motivational imbalance as a key persuasive appeal in terrorist online recruitment can provide the needed psychological theoretical concept to explain their recruitment strategy. To do so, we examine terrorist online recruitment and its features (stages, type of messages, content of the messages, characteristics of the targets) and relate it to the notion of motivational imbalance. Then we explore the trend of ‘narrowcasting’ (focusing persuasive communication on selected target audiences) and how well it combines with motivational imbalance in the process of recruitment by terrorist groups. Finally, we demonstrate how motivational imbalance has been used in recent Jihadi recruitment campaigns. The evidence presented comes from the contents of recruitment campaigns as well as from the testimonies of recruits.

On July 1, 2021, a new social network modeled after Twitter was launched by former Trump spokesman Jason Miller, with assistance and promotion by exiled Chinese businessman Miles Guo, form Trump strategist Steve Bannon, and others. Today, the Stanford Internet Observatory is releasing the first comprehensive analysis of the new platform. We chart the growth of Gettr over its first month, examining the user community, content, structure and dynamics. We also highlight some of the perils of launching such a network without trust and safety measures in place: the proliferation of gratuitous adult content, spam and, unfortunately, child exploitation imagery, all of which could be caught by cursory automated scanning systems.

As liberal democracies grapple with the evolution of online political extremism, in addition to governments, social media and internet infrastructure companies have found themselves making more and more decisions about who gets to use their platforms, and what people say online. This raises the question that this paper explores, who should regulate extremist content online? In doing so the first part of the paper examines the evolution of the increasing role that social media and internet infrastructure companies have come to play in the regulating extremist content online, and the ethical challenges this presents. The second part of the paper explores three ethical challenges: i) the moral legitimacy of private actors, ii) the concentration of power in the hands of a few actors and iii) the lack of separation of powers in the content regulation process by private actors.

This briefing is part of ISD’s Gaming and Extremism Series exploring the role online gaming plays in the strategy of far-right extremists in the UK and globally. This is part of a broader programme on the ‘Future of Extremism’ being delivered by ISD in the second half of 2021, charting the transformational shifts in the extremist threat landscape two decades on from 9/11, and the policy strategies required to counter the next generation of extremist threats. It provides a snapshot overview of the extreme right’s use of Twitch.