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This report highlights the networks, supporters, and the platforms of Islamic State disinformation disseminators, focusing on popular social media platforms as well as encrypted messaging applications. These disinformation networks are creating self-branded media outlets with followers in the tens of thousands, and often with innocuous names like “Global Happenings,” “DRIL” and “Media Center,” to evade moderation and takedowns. These same networks use coded language and a codebook of emojis to spread Islamic State “news” to other networks of supporters, who similarly evade moderation. These ‘alternative news outlets’ are trying to outcompete narratives publicized by government officials as well as independent mainstream media and individual journalists – groups that were also heavily targeted by Islamic State.

This three-article dissertation focuses on cyber-related topics on terrorist groups, specifically Jihadists’ use of technology, the application of natural language processing, and social networks in analyzing text data derived from terrorists’ Dark Web forums. The first article explores cybercrime and cyberterrorism. As technology progresses, it facilitates new forms of behavior, including tech-related crimes known as cybercrime and cyberterrorism. In this article, I provide an analysis of the problems of cybercrime and cyberterrorism within the field of criminology by reviewing existing literature focusing on (a) the issues in defining terrorism, cybercrime, and cyberterrorism, (b) ways that cybercriminals commit a crime in cyberspace, and (c) ways that cyberterrorists attack critical infrastructure, including computer systems, data, websites, and servers.

The article explores Far Cry 5’s commentary on the rise of the radical right, domestic terrorism, and extremism in America. The game’s two primary modes for this narrative critique involve its use of Christian symbolism and its exploration of doomsday prepper culture. What emerges from this analysis is that Far Cry 5 provides a harrowing reckoning in the rise of extremist thought in this country and its ramifications, one that is a timely reflection of current American culture. In Far Cry 5, America becomes the next great empire poised to fall throughout the game and finally, in its tense final sequences, succumbs to nuclear annihilation.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to the creation of a new protest movement, positioned against government lockdowns, mandatory vaccines, and related measures. Efforts to control misinformation by digital platforms resulted in take downs of key accounts and posts. This led some of these protest groups to migrate to platforms with less stringent content moderation policies, such as Telegram. Telegram has also been one of the destinations of the far right, whose deplatforming from mainstream platforms began a few years ago. Given the co-existence of these two movements on Telegram, the article examines their connections. Empirically, the article focused on Irish Telegram groups and channels, identifying relevant protest movements and collecting their posts. Using computational social science methods, we examine whether far-right terms and discourses are present and how this varies across different clusters of Telegram Covid-19 protest groups. In addition, we examine which actors are posting far-right content and what kind of roles they play in the network of Telegram groups. The findings indicate the presence of far-right discourses among the COVID-19 groups. However, the existence of these groups was not solely driven by the extreme right, and the incidence of far-right discourses was not equal across all COVID-19 protest groups. We interpret these findings under the prism of the mediation opportunity structure: while the far right appears to have taken advantage of the network opportunity structure afforded by deplatforming and the migration to Telegram, it did not succeed in diffusing its ideas widely among the COVID-19 protest groups in the Irish Telegram.

Terror attacks are followed by public shock and disorientation. Previous research has found that people use social media to collectively negotiate responses, interpretations, and sense-making in the aftermath of terror attacks. However, the role of ideologically motivated discussions and their relevance to the overall discourse have not been studied. This paper ad-dresses this gap and focuses specifically on the far-right discourse, comparing it to the general public Twitter discourse following the terror attack in Hanau in 2020. A multi-method ap-proach combines network analysis and structural topic modelling to analyse 237,000 tweets. We find responsibility attribution to be one of the central themes: The general discourse pri-marily voiced sympathy with the victims and attributed responsibility for the attack to far-right terror or activism. In contrast, the far right – in an attempt to reshape the general narra-tive – raised a plethora of arguments to shift the attribution of responsibility from far-right activism towards the (political) elite and the personal circumstances of the shooter. In terms of information sharing and seeking, we demonstrate that new information was contextualised differentially depending on the ideological stance. The results are situated in the scientific dis-course concerning differences in social media communication ensuing terrorist attacks.

Terrorism, global pandemics, climate change, wars and all the major threats of our age have been targets of online extremism. The same social media occupying the heartland of our social world leaves us vulnerable to cybercrime, electoral fraud and the ‘fake news’ fuelling the rise of far-right violence and hate speech. In the face of widespread calls for action, governments struggle to reform legal and regulatory frameworks designed for an analogue age. And what of our rights as citizens? As politicians and lawyers run to catch up to the future as it disappears over the horizon, who guarantees our right to free speech, to free and fair elections, to play video games, to surf the Net, to believe ‘fake news’?

Rethinking Social Media and Extremism offers a broad range of perspectives on violent extremism online and how to stop it. As one major crisis follows another and a global pandemic accelerates our turn to digital technologies, attending to the issues raised in this book becomes ever more urgent.