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Recent years has seen a trend towards the increasing specificity of recruitment targets for global jihad. This paper is a case study of the discourses used to recruit a Western female who originally subscribed to an antigovernment, anti-New World Order ideology. Categorising using grounded theory analysis found that female recruiters tapped into the interest of their target subject and then shifted her towards sympathy and commitment to radical Islam. This was achieved through media saturation of Western aggression against Muslims coupled with an ideology that promotes the need to fight and resist. Subject material to which the recruit was directed was carefully controlled and initially deemphasized the Qur’an in favour of mujahedeen narratives and the teachings of Anwar al-Awlaki. Overall, the research supported a sophisticated narrowcasting strategy that was carefully developed primarily by female recruiters.

Extremism has grown as a global problem for society in recent years, especially after the apparition of movements such as jihadism. This and other extremist groups have taken advantage of different approaches, such as the use of Social Media, to spread their ideology, promote their acts and recruit followers. The extremist discourse, therefore, is reflected on the language used by these groups. Natural language processing (NLP) provides a way of detecting this type of content, and several authors make use of it to describe and discriminate the discourse held by these groups, with the final objective of detecting and preventing its spread. Following this approach, this survey aims to review the contributions of NLP to the field of extremism research, providing the reader with a comprehensive picture of the state of the art of this research area. The content includes a first conceptualization of the term extremism, the elements that compose an extremist discourse and the differences with other terms. After that, a review description and comparison of the frequently used NLP techniques is presented, including how they were applied, the insights they provided, the most frequently used NLP software tools, descriptive and classification applications, and the availability of datasets and data sources for research. Finally, research questions are approached and answered with highlights from the review, while future trends, challenges and directions derived from these highlights are suggested towards stimulating further research in this exciting research area.

This article analyzes the possible relationship between terrorist groups and the media. As an example, a case study on the Al Qaeda organization will be used. Our methodology will involve analyzing the content of its public statements and examining the developments that have taken place during its history as an organization. Both perspectives suggest that terrorism’s view of the media, far from being composed of rigorous ideological or political principles, is shaped by their calculations of estimated opportunities. Its perception of the mass media, has depended on its perception of estimated media impact. This has determined three stages during its history: 1) Hostility toward media that it has held responsible for hiding or distorting its message; 2) Adaptation to a new environment where there are networks that are willing to interpret reality from a perspective similar to the jihadist point of view 3) Exploitation of the Internet as an indirect means of obtaining the mass media’s attention.

This article offers a descriptive analysis of the propaganda activities of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb on Internet social media. It examines the group’s propaganda actions from its creation in 1998 until the end of 2015 and argues that the use of social media, Twitter in particular, has failed to offer any real remedy to its mediocre propaganda actions. During the period in which its Twitter profiles were active, the organization continued to manifest the same problems, including a shortage of qualified human resources and poor internal coordination, which had prevented it from engaging in efficient propaganda activity previously. The study of the social media experience of the group offers further evidence of the vulnerabilities of this Maghrebi jihadist organization.

The present article contends that terrorist activism on the Internet is determined by the technical configuration and ease of use of the tool. Engagement in Internet activities considered criminal offenses is not only explained by a progression in the level of radicalization of the individual. Rather, the type of barriers to entry which they must overcome plays a decisive role in the decision. The article classifies the various Internet spaces featuring terrorist content under the categories of “hard platforms” and “friendly platforms”. This differentiation will enable us to identify how the barriers to entry to such activism have evolved over the last two decades and how this evolution has been responsible for different levels of terrorist mobilization in cyberspace. The investigation focuses on jihadist terrorism and uses the antiterrorist operations carried out in Spain during the period 2001-2020 as a case study.

This article offers a descriptive analysis of intelligence operations carried out by the United States and its allies against the presence of jihadist groups on the Internet during the period 2001–2020. In contrast to actions aimed at eliminating the virtual spaces in which terrorists operate, the intelligence operations analysed here are designed to erode terrorists’ trust in such spaces without compromising intelligence sources. The article argues that the combination of cyberattacks and psychological operations in the form of honeypots and sabotage have achieved considerable success in terms of reducing terrorist activities on the Internet and undermining the effectiveness of propaganda initiatives undertaken by terrorist groups.