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VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

Radical right actors routinely use social media to spread highly divisive, disruptive, and anti-democratic messages. Assessing and countering such content is crucial for ensuring that online spaces can be open, accessible, and constructive. However, previous work has paid little attention to understanding factors associated with radical right content that goes viral. We investigate this issue with a new dataset (the ‘ROT’ dataset) which provides insight into the content, engagement, and followership of a set of 35 radical right actors who are active in the UK. ROT contains over 50,000 original entries and over 40 million retweets, quotes, replies and mentions, as well as detailed information about followership. We use a multilevel model to assess engagement with tweets and show the importance of both actor- and content-level factors, including the number of followers each actor has, the toxicity of their content, the presence of media and explicit requests for retweets. We argue that it is crucial to account for role of actors in radical right viral tweets, and therefore, moderation efforts should be taken not only on a post-to-post level but also on an account level.

This study analyzes how Inspire and Dabiq seek to appeal to and
radicalize English-speaking Muslims. It examines how each magazine
strategically designs ingroup, Other, crisis, and solution constructs and
interplays these via value-, dichotomy-, and crisis-reinforcing
narratives. This analysis also explores how narrative, imagery, and
counternarrative messaging are used to shape readers’ perceptions
and polarize their support. While both magazines are dominated by
narratives designed to empower readers toward action, Inspire relies
heavily on identity-choice appeals while Dabiq tends to balance
identity- and rational-choice messaging. This study concludes by
identifying key lessons for counterterrorism strategic communications
campaign and message design.

Many extreme right groups have had an online presence for some time through the use of dedicated websites. This has been accompanied by increased activity in social media websites in recent years, which may enable the dissemination of extreme right content to a wider audience. In this paper, we present exploratory analysis of the activity of a selection of such groups on Twitter, using network representations based on reciprocal follower and mentions interactions. We find that stable communities of related users are present within individual country networks, where these communities are usually associated with variants of extreme right ideology. Furthermore, we also identify the presence of international relationships between certain groups across geopolitical boundaries.