Online Library

VOX-Pol Blog post.

The internet has profoundly changed the way we communicate, including how jihadist groups seek to reach Western audiences with their propaganda strategies. Cases of believed online-radicalization call for a re-evaluation of radicalization processes, previously thought to depend on face-to-face interactions. Based on the Hoffman-Sageman debate on whether top-down or bottom-up processes drive terrorism, this essay explores both social movement and organizational approaches to understand online-radicalization. Do jihadist organizations such as Al-Qaeda and IS act as ‘fishermen’, actively engaging in the radicalization processes of individual recruits, or is radicalization driven by social group dynamics with little organizational involvement? Essentially, the larger question is: What role do organizational structures play for radicalization in times of ‘virtual jihad’? Bottomup radicalization processes are facilitated online, because the conditions for Sageman’s ‘bunch of guys’ are replicated by the characteristics of virtual communication: an echo chamber effect causes frame-alignment through repetition and enables ‘digital natives’ to communicate claims that resonate with other ‘digital natives’. Top-down structures are influential, because organizations continue to employ sophisticated propaganda development, preachers and special recruiters or ‘fishermen’. The article finds evidence for both schools of thought and concludes that the internet facilitates both types of radicalization mechanisms. Only a holistic strategy will be successful in battling online radicalization and must include both targeting direct channels through which the organizations execute control over recruits, and breaking the echo chamber created by social movement dynamics in the virtual world. While countermeasures need to include the provision of alternative social narratives and the utilization of ‘digital natives’ to make counter-messages more effective, organizational structures need to be tackled simultaneously, not only by identifying and arresting preachers and recruiters, but also through stronger internet governance tools and collaboration with social media companies.

Since the beginning of 2020, while societies and economies around the world have struggled to cope with the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic, cyberspace has given governments, businesses, and general end-users the ability to work, play, and connect in new and innovative ways. With everything from workspaces and classrooms to family gatherings and exercise routines forced online, the Internet has enabled people across the globe to carry on and maintain a sense of normalcy during very abnormal times. However, at the same time, while the world has been focused on the health, economic, political, and social ramifications of the pandemic, terrorist organizations, fringe groups, and extremist communities around the world have become emboldened, finding opportunity to exploit the situation, incite hate, (re)mobilize, and promote their ideologies online in novel ways. These groups—which we loosely classify as malicious nonstate actors for the purposes of this research —have been primarily focused on exploiting and contributing to the diffusion of information during the pandemic for their own strategic gain.

Since its early mainstream adoption in the 1990s, the Internet has been leveraged by white supremacist groups to recruit and radicalize individuals. Twenty years later, social media platforms, like YouTube, reddit, and Twitter, continue to further this practice. The attention of researchers has been primarily centered on white supremacist men, and this focus on white men erases white women’s roles as active agents in the spread of white supremacy, skewing our understanding of white supremacy as a whole. This study used digital ethnography and interviews to examine the ways white women are radicalized to organized white supremacy through popular social media platforms YouTube, reddit, and Twitter. The study found white women were radicalized by engaging with posts and joining communities focusing on beauty, anti-feminism or “The Red Pill,” traditionalist gender values or #TradLives, and alt-right politics. White supremacist recruiters leveraged gendered topics and weaponized platform features – likes, sharing, comments, recommendation algorithms, etc. – to cultivate a sense of community. Through involvement with these communities, women were introduced to racialized perspectives on each topic, usually after a catalytic pop culture or newsworthy event, and slowly radicalized to organized white supremacy.

Using a dataset of over 1.9 million messages posted on Twitter by about 25,000 ISIS members, we explore how ISIS makes use of social media to spread its propaganda and to recruit militants from the Arab world and across the globe. By distinguishing between violence-driven, theological, and sectarian content, we trace the connection between online rhetoric and key events on the ground. To the best of our knowledge, ours is one of the first studies to focus on Arabic content, while most literature focuses on English content. Our findings yield new important insights about how social media is used by radical militant groups to target the Arab-speaking world, and reveal important patterns in their propaganda efforts.

VOX-Pol Blog post.