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Research surrounding radicalization to and use of violence among extremist and terror groups has expanded over the last decade. There are still fundamental questions that must be addressed, particularly regarding the role of the Internet in radicalisation and recruitment as well as general technological skill within extremist groups. Few studies have considered this issue, especially among Far Right groups which have been identified as one of the top threats to public safety within the United States. This exploratory study addresses these issues using a qualitative analysis of a sample of threads from a technology-specific subforum of a widely used web forum in the white nationalist and white power movement. The findings demonstrate that the process of information sharing is distinct from that of more sophisticated deviant and criminal communities on-line, as users readily answer basic technological questions rather than discuss offensive attack techniques. The implications of this study for future research are examined in depth.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

The author seeks to highlight just how central this unofficial Islamic State ecosystem is to audiences inspired by the group and how the interplay between this ecosystem and youth requires reframing the challenge rather than doubling down on the same playbooks. This article will first present the connection between these young peoples’ use of social media and their attacks. The author will then seek to create the tie-in between the real-world threats posed by these youth-led plots and the unofficial digital ecosystem of the Islamic State, going beyond and expanding the author’s previous work into the ecosystem. 16 This tie-in will be followed by an analysis of the unofficial Islamic State ecosystem, expanding on what the author has already published about it, and will do so by diving into the outlets and tactics central to the ecosystem, and will conclude with recommendations for digital counterterrorism practitioners and researchers. The article will build on a broader report by the author on the Islamic State’s online activities that was published by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) on February 12, 2025.

The ISD Germany study on the extreme right-wing use of Telegram serves as a complementary text to the “Escape routes” report. In it, the research team examined links to other platforms, which were shared on the controversial messenger service and were disseminated in the channels of right-wing extremists, right-wing radicals and conspiracy ideologues in the German-speaking world. The main scope of this research was on smaller platforms that do not fall under the deletion obligation of the NetzDG. Links to larger platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter were also analysed, given that the collected data set contained almost twice as many links to these platforms than to those not fully covered by the NetzDG.

For this report, the ISD research team collected 659,110 messages from 238 public channels from the extreme right, radical right, Reichsbürger:innen and conspiracy ideology spectrum between 1 January and 12 September 2021. From these messages, 371,988 links were extracted, leading to 8,252 domains. The ISD Germany researchers examined domains that were shared more than 15 times and identified social networks and platforms.