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■ Internet subcultures take advantage of the current media ecosystem to manipulate news frames, set agendas, and propagate ideas.

■ Far-right groups have developed techniques of “attention hacking” to increase the visibility of their ideas through the strategic use of social media, memes, and bots—as well as by targeting journalists, bloggers, and influencers to help spread content.

■ The media’s dependence on social media, analytics and metrics, sensationalism, novelty over newsworthiness, and clickbait makes them vulnerable to such media manipulation.

■ While trolls, white nationalists, men’s rights activists, gamergaters, the “altright,” and conspiracy theorists may diverge deeply in their beliefs, they share tactics and converge on common issues.

■ The far-right exploits young men’s rebellion and dislike of “political correctness” to spread white supremacist thought, Islamophobia, and misogyny through irony and knowledge of internet culture.

■ Media manipulation may contribute to decreased trust of mainstream media, increased misinformation, and further radicalization.

This report presents research carried out within the project (Ku2016/01373/D – Uppdrag till Totalförsvarets forskningsinstitut (FOI) att göra kartläggningar och analyser av våldsbejakande extremistisk propaganda) that has been assigned to the Swedish defence research agency by the Swedish Government. The project will continue until March 2019. The purpose of this report is to highlight various aspects of IS’s digital propaganda; How it is spread, what its content is, how the content varies over time, and how images are used in the propaganda. We have also studied the role of women and children in IS-propaganda, and how a youth culture called Jihadi cool has evolved with its own kind of clothing, music and cultural expressions. IS’s propaganda contains a variety of religious concepts and references, which IS sometimes use in a non-traditional way. Therefore, a chapter in this report describes how Islamic politico-religious language can be used to convey different kinds of messages

Community Action for Preventing Extremism (CAPE) is Australia’s only not-for-profit counter-extremism project focused specifically on preventing a growth in right-wing extremism. By disseminating counter-narratives to extremism through the exitwhitepower.com website and directly engaging with individuals at-risk via social media, CAPE seeks to sow a seed of doubt that will reduce individual’s vulnerability to involvement in the far-right. This paper will outline CAPE’s practitioner experience in developing online interventions to challenge far-right narratives and the advantages of using this method of engagement. The paper will also outline distinctions between traditional white supremacist far-right groups and the increasingly active anti-Muslim groups, which create challenges for CAPE’s work in countering far-right online activity.

The idea that the internet may enable an individual to become radicalized has been of increasing concern over the last two decades. Indeed, the internet provides individuals with an opportunity to access vast amounts of information and to connect to new people and new groups. Together, these prospects may create a compelling argument that radicalization via the internet is plausible. So, is this really the case? Can viewing ‘radicalizing’ material and interacting with others online actually cause someone to subsequently commit violent and/or extremist acts? In this article, we discuss the potential role of the internet in radicalization and relate to how cybersecurity and certain HCI ‘affordances’ may support it. We focus on how the design of systems provides opportunities for extremist messages to spread and gain credence, and how an application of HCI and user-centered understanding of online behavior and cybersecurity might be used to counter extremist messages. By drawing upon existing research that may be used to further understand and address internet radicalization, we discuss some future research directions and associated challenges.

Radical ideologies and violent extremism continue to plague Kyrgyzstan and the Central Asia region, with approximately 2,000 Central Asians traveling to Syria and Iraq to join violent extremist groups. As fear of terrorism has grown in the region, the Kyrgyz government has increased scrutiny of Islam, with authorities conducting “appraisals” of clergy leaders, and violent clashes occurring between state police and suspected violent extremists. Despite these crackdowns, however, recruitment into religious-based violent extremist organizations continues both in-person and online. Social media plays a significant role in the dissemination and absorption of radical ideologies and narratives in Kyrgyzstan. Internet sites and mobile phone applications, including those that allow for messaging and content exchange, are actively used by extremist groups banned in Kyrgyzstan, such as the Islamic State (ISIS).

The ever-increasing use of the internet by terrorist groups as a platform for the dissemination of radical, violent ideologies is well documented. The internet has, in this way, become a breeding ground for potential lone-wolf terrorists; that is, individuals who commit acts of terror inspired by the ideological rhetoric emitted by terrorist organizations. These individuals are characterized by their lack of formal affiliation with terror organizations, making them difficult to intercept with traditional intelligence techniques. The radicalization of individuals on the internet poses a considerable threat to law enforcement and national security officials. This new medium of radicalization, however, also presents new opportunities for the interdiction of lone wolf terrorism. This dissertation is an account of the development and evaluation of an information technology (IT) framework for detecting potentially radicalized individuals on social media sites and Web fora. Unifying Collective Action Framing Theory (CAFT) and a radicalization model of lone wolf terrorism, this dissertation analyzes a corpus of propaganda documents produced by V several, radically different, terror organizations. This analysis provides the building blocks to define a knowledge model of terrorist ideological framing that is implemented as a Semantic Web Ontology. Using several techniques for ontology guided information extraction, the resultant ontology can be accurately processed from textual data sources. This dissertation subsequently defines several techniques that leverage the populated ontological representation for automatically identifying individuals who are potentially radicalized to one or more terrorist ideologies based on their postings on social media and other Web fora. The dissertation also discusses how the ontology can be queried using intuitive structured query languages to infer triggering events in the news. The prototype system is evaluated in the context of classification and is shown to provide state of the art results. The main outputs of this research are (1) an ontological model of terrorist ideologies (2) an information extraction framework capable of identifying and extracting terrorist ideologies from text, (3) a classification methodology for classifying Web content as resonating the ideology of one or more terrorist groups and (4) a methodology for rapidly identifying news content of relevance to one or more terrorist groups