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This paper analyses the impact of a series of mass shootings committed in 2018–2019 by right-wing extremists on 8chan/pol, a prominent far-right online forum. Using computational methods, it offers a detailed examination of how attacks trigger shifts in both forum activity and content. We find that while each shooting is discussed by forum participants, their respective impact varies considerably. We highlight, in particular, a ‘Tarrant effect’: the considerable effect Brenton Tarrant’s attack of two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, had on the forum. Considering the rise in far-right terrorism and the growing and diversifying online far-right ecosystem, such interactive offline-online effects warrant the attention of scholars and security professionals.

This article introduces the method of podcast ethnography. The method encompasses three general stages: to explore a podcast from a particular social field, to engage with it through careful, ethnographic reflexivity and to examine the podcast by developing typologies and themes expedient for analysis. Podcast ethnography is beneficial due to its spatial and temporal flexibility; observing a podcast universe can be performed on the move and in parallel with other tasks. This advantage enables a much-needed breathing space for researchers inquiring vehement milieus, such as white radical nationalism. The article uses an example from this precise milieu in Sweden – the podcast Motgift [Antidote] – to illustrate and flesh out the potentials and challenges of applying the method’s three stages. In so doing, the article argues for inclusion of podcast ethnography into the extended family of ethnographic methods.

Although it is understudied relative to other social media platforms, YouTube is arguably the largest and most engaging online media consumption platform in the world. Recently, YouTube’s outsize influence has sparked concerns that its recommendation algorithm systematically directs users to radical right-wing content. Here we investigate these concerns with large scale longitudinal data of individuals’ browsing behavior spanning January 2016 through December 2019. Consistent with previous work, we find that political news content accounts for a relatively small fraction (11%) of consumption on YouTube, and is dominated by mainstream and largely centrist sources. However, we also find evidence for a small but growing “echo chamber” of far-right content consumption. Users in this community show higher engagement and greater “stickiness” than users who consume any other category of content. Moreover, YouTube accounts for an increasing fraction of these users’ overall online news consumption. Finally, while the size, intensity, and growth of this echo chamber present real concerns, we find no evidence that they are caused by YouTube recommendations. Rather, consumption of radical content on YouTube appears to reflect broader patterns of news consumption across the web. Our results emphasize the importance of measuring consumption directly rather than inferring it from recommendations.

In this essay, I discuss how the alt-right has brought back into fashion traditional tenets of the reactionary, xenophobic, and often racist far-right, as demonstrated by George Hawley, and how it has managed to make these tenets appear as novel, provocative, and updated to the 21st century U.S. society and digital environment. I argue that to do so, alt-righters relied heavily on the creation, and sometimes reappropriation, of enemy images, with the ultimate goals of provoking outrage, instilling fear and/or hatred towards specific groups, reinforcing a sense of belonging within their own community, or more broadly manipulating collective perceptions and representations, first online then in real life. Indeed, the election of Donald Trump was hailed by the online alt-right as one of their major successes. With the help of irony, subversion, and often carefully engineered propaganda-like messages and images, the alt-right, it boasts, “meme’d into office” the Republican candidate. This paper consequently leads to an analysis of real-life repercussions of such adversarial rhetoric, notably through examples of recent far-right domestic terrorism in the US, and to a reflection on their place in an age of post-truth, fake news, and alternative facts. This contribution focuses on several enemy images. The first is that of the civilizational enemy from the outside, which uses the traditional process of othering. This theme is linked to Trump’s campaign and to his attacks against two major “enemies” of the U.S., namely Hispanics and Muslims. With the alt-right, refugees for example become “rapefugees,” which easily appeals to rampant islamophobia. The second enemy image created by the alt-right consists in its ideological opponents. Here, the function of the enemy image is to discredit opponents and their views (“cuckservative,” “feminazi,” or the sarcastic “Social Justice Warrior”). The third enemy image establishes a link between the first two. It depicts what I would call the “enemy within,” a common thread (or threat) in far-right ideologies. Indeed, cultural Marxism, a widespread conspiracy theory among the alt-right, is what its proponents believe to be the hidden reason for the perceived decline of the Western civilization. According to this worldview, the ideological opponents push a conspiracy against the West and its values. The recurring claims of a liberal bias among the media and academia also belong to this conspiracy theory. It also embraces elements of anti-Semitism, as well as traditional aspects of anti-communism, reminiscent of the historical Red Scares. Such a theory thus provides its believers with a broader narrative, as well as with a common enemy to rally against, and therefore builds a form of intersectionality among various online fringe groups.

Extremist groups’ online recruitment mechanisms frequently exploit the wide range of grievances and vulnerabilities experienced by individuals at-risk of radicalisation. While it is widely accepted that mental health and wellbeing play a vital role in resilience to violent extremism, most approaches tend to focus on preventing violent extremism through purely ideological means and are not sufficiently tailored to the individual at-risk.

In an effort to understand this audience further and, more importantly, the most effective means of preventing violent extremism, Moonshot conducted an experiment to assess the propensity among at-risk users in Indonesia to engage with ideological counter-content compared to psychosocial support content. The data gathered during this pilot indicate that psychosocial support is an area of unmet need among some of the individuals most vulnerable to violent jihadist recruitment online in Indonesia, and that this population is open to engaging with online support.

The Facebook Redirect Programme (FRP) is designed to combat violent extremism and dangerous organisations by redirecting users who have entered hate or violence-related search queries towards educational resources and outreach groups. A pilot of the programme was launched with delivery partners Life After Hate in May 2019 and Exit Australia in September 2019. It was specifically designed to ensure that individuals searching for white supremacist and/or neo-Nazi communities on Facebook would be offered authentic, meaningful and impactful support off-platform. The purpose of this pilot was to test the programme design and inform future deployments targeting both new geographies and other hate-based communities. Moonshot was contracted by Facebook to evaluate the pilot period of programme performance and make recommendations for future deployments. This report evaluates the pilot programme by examining:
-Facebook’s use of keywords and the safety module as a method of redirecting people off-platform;
-The full user journey from Facebook to delivery partner landing pages;
-The extent to which the pilot can be considered a proof of concept for future deployments.