Online Library

Recent right-wing extremist terrorists were active in online fringe communities connected to the alt-right movement. Although these are commonly considered as distinctly hateful, racist, and misogynistic, the prevalence of hate speech in these communities has not been comprehensively investigated yet, particularly regarding more implicit and covert forms of hate. This study exploratively investigates the extent, nature, and clusters of different forms of hate speech in political fringe communities on Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan. To do so, a manual quantitative content analysis of user comments (N=6,000) was combined with an automated topic modeling approach. The findings of the study not only show that hate is prevalent in all three communities (24% of comments contained explicit or implicit hate speech), but also provide insights into common types of hate speech expression, targets, and differences between the studied communities.

Canadian right-wing extremism is now recognized as a serious problem and their use of social media to circulate hate, violence, and racism is a growing concern. However, not until circa 2016 did Canadian academics, police agencies, and intelligence agencies view the threat of right-wing extremism as a national security issue within Canada. My dissertation examines the usage of social media by “right-wing extremist”(RWE) groups in Canada to contribute to the collective knowledge pool of Canadian right-wing extremism. It aims to identify hate as an affective form of communication regularly utilized by right-wing extremists through their usages of social media. This dissertation draws upon conceptual resources in media and communication studies to develop an analytical framework to examine how four Canadian RWE Facebook pages, Pegida Canada, Act for Canada, Canada Defence League, and Canada Three Percenters, created a digital space to justify and circulate racism, hate, and violence in social media. I use social network analysis, news event analysis, and frame shift analysis to unpack the digital space that leads to what I label as “malicious enclaves”: a facade of a politically oriented group that establishes a veil of legitimacy to facilitate hateful and violence-endorsing views primarily on digital social media. The social network analysis generates an understanding of how malicious enclaves are connected and interacted with various Facebook pages, the news event analysis provides a glimpse at a two-day data inclusion window to ascertain how the malicious enclaves respond to a pre-defined news event, and finally, the frame shift analysis examines how the malicious enclaves collectively switch their frames to respond to a novel news event. My dissertation demonstrates how the online circulation of grievances around victimization has positioned racism and violence toward hated others, especially Muslims, as an RWE’s defensive response necessary to protect the nation. My research into malicious enclaves unravel an intimate relationship between social media, racist forms of hatred, and violence. Ultimately, it challenges the notion that we need only be concerned about the possibility of spillage from online to offline activity, and it encourages attention to less “spectacular” and visible forms of violence.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

Online extremism remains a persistent problem despite the best efforts of governments, tech companies and civil society. Digital technologies can induce group polarization to promote extremism and cause substantial changes to extremism (e.g., create new forms of extremism, types of threats or radicalization approaches). Current methods to counter extremism induce undesirable side‐effects (e.g., ostracize minorities, inadvertently promote extremism) or do not leverage the full potential of digital technologies. Extremism experts recognize the need for researchers from other disciplines, like information systems, to contribute their technical expertise for understanding and countering online extremism. This article aims to introduce the field of information systems to the issue of online extremism. Information systems scholars address technology‐related societal issues from a sociotechnical perspective. The sociotechnical perspective describes systems through a series of interactions between social (structure, people) and technical components (physical system, task). We apply the sociotechnical perspective to (1) summarize the current state‐of‐the‐art knowledge of 222 articles in a systematic multi‐disciplinary literature review and (2) propose specific research questions that address two questions (How do digital technologies augment extremism? How can we successfully counter online extremism?).

The terrorist attacks in Norway in 2011 and New Zealand in 2019 have revealed that the far-right worldwide uses the memory of the Yugoslav wars for online mobilization. Scholars working on memory activism usually deal with the liberal, self-critical memory emerging from the bottom-up activism of human rights groups while neglecting the activism of the far-right. This article fills the gap by addressing the global circulation of two memes, Remove Kebab and Pepe the Frog, as examples of far-right memory activism. In order to address the transnational circulation of memes as memory activism, this article employs the concept of ‘traveling memory’ while relying on multimodal discourse analysis to unveil the processes of memetic transformation, imitation, iconization and narrativization. The analysis reveals an alternative memory of Yugoslav wars that depicts Serbia as the first case of ‘white genocide’ in Europe, reversing the roles of war criminals and victims while propagating violence and celebrating genocide. The article argues that memory studies can no longer ignore memory production of far-right communities and, at the same time, outlines the method for examining far-right digital memory activism, revealing a whole set of mnemonic practices developed among the anonymous fringe communities of the far-right.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.