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There is an on-going debate over the role of online activities in the radicalisation process. However, much of this debate has focused on Western countries, particularly in relation to ISIL’s online influence of homegrown terrorism and of foreign fighter travel to Iraq and Syria. Less is known about patterns of online radicalisation in Africa and about the extent to which African national governmental strategies focus on addressing this issue. To address this gap in knowledge, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) commissioned RAND Europe to explore social media use and online radicalisation in Africa.

The influence of social media on the spread of violent extremist narratives and online radicalisation processes has recently become a focal point for research in the fields of Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism; however, most of the studies thus far have focused on Western countries and have often been aimed at analysing phenomena such as homegrown and lone wolf terrorism or the online radicalisation of foreign terrorist fighters. Far less evidence-based research has explored the influence of social media on terrorism in Africa and even less regarding Mali in particular. In this report, ICCT and the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) seek to fill this gap through an analysis of survey data from youth participants in their joint on-the-ground project in Mali—“Mali (Dis-) Engagement and Re-Integration related to Terrorism” (MERIT)—to determine the implications of social media use for violent extremism in Mali.

The chapter addresses the question of how crisis and emergency communicators in the justice (police) and health sector in Norway reflect on their use – or lack of use – of social media during the terror crisis on 22 July 2011. We examine how these communicators in the years following the crisis have developed their use of social media to optimise their and the public’s awareness of similar crises. Our semi-structured interviews with key emergency managers and responders display how the terrorist-induced crisis in 2011 was a wake-up call for communicators in the police and the health sector. They reflect on the significance, strengths and weaknesses of social media in the management of crises such as this one. Book edited by Harald Hornmoen and Klas Backholm

VOX-Pol Blog post.

It has become a familiar observation that social media usage can afford material assistance to the advancement of violent extremist or terrorist causes and can be a tool for counter-extremism and counter-terrorism efforts. This chapter discusses how several core supporting pillars of extremism mesh with social media in apparently similar ways to non-extremist activity and then considers the limited available literature on non-extremist online fundraising, moving thereafter to the literature which is more focused specifically on the study of social media funding for extremist or terrorist causes. It highlights the potential role of symbolic representation of shared values on social media and how this can help to address the challenges of an era where large-scale but ostensibly non-extremist movements such as QAnon and Stop the Steal arguably share some values in common with extremist causes and hence are a potential funding reservoir not necessarily observed if one focuses on specific extremist messaging content or extremist symbology.

Social media platforms have become extremely popular in the last fifteen years. Almost half of the world population has a social media account. This has made social media extremely attractive to extremist groups. Recent studies have shown that extremists use social media platforms for violent radicalisation. They take advantage of the interactional nature of these platforms to recruit and influence individuals at risk of radicalisation. Through social media interactions, individuals at risk of radicalisation develop a sense of shared identity which appears to be an important driver in the process of violent radicalisation. Although many studies have highlighted the importance of social media interactions in online radicalisation, it seems that none of these studies has analysed these interactions from an interactional perspective. This paper aims to fill this gap in violent radicalisation research. It proposes to use Conversation Analysis (CA) for the examination of interactions occurring between extremists and potential recruits on social media platforms. More importantly, this article will show the benefits of using CA for the analysis of these interactions.