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VOX-Pol Blog post.

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.

The Islamic State’s (IS) online propaganda has been analyzed from various perspectives aimed at defining the role of the Internet, the power of social media networks, and the main narratives processed online by terrorist organizations. Nevertheless, very little research has focused on defining IS’s comprehensive media strategy. To date, IS propaganda has been defined as multidimensional or as a mix of techniques related to moviemaking and video games. In consideration of the highly sophisticated IS online dissemination activity and its impact on Western youth who are already familiar with intensive media consumption, this article explores IS propaganda through a Hollywood-style transmedia approach. I analyze, through a qualitative content analysis of the magazine Dabiq narratives, IS propaganda as a comprehensive transmedia strategy centered on three key assets: synergistic storytelling, imaginary world-making, and semantic triggering.

This article is a systematic large-scale study of the reasons driving political fragmentation on social media. Making use of a comparative dataset of the Twitter discussion activities of 115 political groups in 26 countries, it shows that groups that are further apart in ideological terms interact less, and that groups that sit at the extremes of the ideological scale are particularly likely to have lower patterns of interaction. Indeed, exchanges between centrists who sit on different sides of the left–right divide are more likely than connections between centrists and extremists who are from the same ideological wing. In light of the results, theory about exposure to different ideological viewpoints online is enhanced.

Women participate extensively in armed, Islamist struggle. In recent years, foreign women have travelled from the West to join Daesh. Their participation perplexes policymakers, government officials, and researchers who call attention to the group’s gendered regulation, violence, and widespread use of rape. Consequently, observers often argue that women are deceived by the organisation or seduced by the promise of romance. This suggests that women would not, under rational circumstances, choose to join the group. In this article, we address two resultant questions: why do Western women join Daesh? Are their motivations distinct from other Islamist recruits? Using an original dataset of social media activity from 17 Western female recruits between 2011–15, we conclude that women are primarily driven by religious ideology that adopts an expressly gendered frame. We find that feelings of isolation and disaffection also drive migration. We suggest that female foreign recruits are not unique in their motivations and share many similarities with male fighters and women in other Islamist organisations. This research has valuable implications for security studies and counterterrorism, which tend to treat extremist women as unique. Female recruits should be taken seriously as insurgents intent on establishing an Islamic caliphate.

Blogs, social media, and search engines have democratized information seekers and providers. However, the same affordances of the Internet have also contributed to resurgence and transformation of far-right and racist communities. Despite a growing number of studies of far-right communities, little attention has so far been paid to the mechanisms through which far-right and racist ideologies are presented to the wider public. This paper contributes to this field of research with a longitudinal study of Swedish anti-immigration activity on Twitter between 2010 and 2013. Results are placed in a larger context provided by additional data from blogs and related studies.