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This paper discusses research on QAnon, a controversial conspiracy movement. Its public engagement mechanisms and discursive practices, focusing on members’ activities on Telegram, are analysed. These activities have elevated concerns about the group’s threat to democracy, prompting intelligence agencies to identify it as a potential risk. This study emphasises the need to understand QAnon’s discursive practices for safeguarding democratic foundations. The author aims to demonstrate how linguistics can aid in analysing Political and Military discourse, assisting institutions in countering destabilising movements. The research uses Open Source Intelligence techniques to analyse QAnon members’ activities, disinformation campaigns, and conspiracy theories on Telegram. Positive Discourse Analysis and Netnography allow us to investigate discourse types and construct discoursive paradigms of resistance. The study conducts quantitative and qualitative analyses on a corpus of Telegram channels items to identify recurring themes and semantic areas, shedding light on the differences between Qlobal-Change USA and Qlobal-Change Italia channels.

The article explores the patterning and functioning of attitude semantics in the practice of identity attacks within terrorist communications. Positioned in facework and stance-taking research (e.g. Tracy & Tracy, 1998, 2008, 2017), it introduces the concepts of ‘evaluative textbites’ and ‘attitudinal priming’ to linguistic examinations, advocating a functional approach to unravelling identity attacks, drawing on corpus analysis methods (e.g. word frequency, and concordance-line qualitative analysis) and the Appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005). Findings reveal that, linked with stance-taking activity, attitudinal priming offers insights into how specific ideational targets are primed for particular attitudinal, evaluative functions. Evaluative textbites provide linguistic evidence of an author’s encoded hostile attitude and the nuanced patterning and functioning of ‘ideation-attitude’ co-occurrences in these attacks. Identity attacks are a rhetorical tool, normative and valuation-based, targeting individuals’ or out-groups’ immoral behaviours and devaluing victims by reference to their personal traits, power-distance relationships, interactional roles, and master identities. This article offers implications for future study of identity attacks in hate crimes, genocidal rhetoric, and defamation texts, and strengthens counter-extremism efforts by illuminating the investigative value of identity work.

Research on far-right extremism has grown substantially over the last decade, owing to the rise of Trump, attacks such as the one in Christchurch and Buffalo, as well as the mainstreaming of hate speech and polarization. In addition to research, there have been antifascist activists who have been engaged in doxxing members of the far right who are part of our schools, our militaries, and governments. Releasing the private information of members of far-right movements to the public has created interesting policy and law enforcement dilemmas. With respect to law enforcement, can doxxing be used as a tool to force individuals to disengage from groups? For social media companies, doxxing violates their terms of service, but should an exception be made in these instances since it purportedly serves a public interest? For this paper, we interviewed 10 former members of the far right who have experienced doxxing over the last several years. The paper explores what happened, the immediate and long-term effects of doxxing on their lives, and ongoing challenges of being exposed against their will. We conclude with some policy recommendations related to the costs and benefits of doxxing on these individuals but also society at large.

The ‘involuntary celibates’, or men who have been unable to find romantic or sexual relationships with women despite wanting to, have congregated in the online incel community. Though initially supportive in nature, the community has become a hotbed for (violent) online misogyny. My ongoing virtual ethnographic research focuses on the nature of the incel community and its members, and how the community plays a role in online misogynistic radicalization. To this end, this contribution applies Bayerl et al.’s Radicalisation-Factor Model and its four interlinked factors—the individual, the environment, the radical groups and ideology, and technologies—to the incel community. This adjusted framework find its basis in existing insights from domains such as (online) radicalization, social psychology, scholarship of gender, masculinity and misogyny, and is further inspired by ongoing non-participatory observations on incel forums. By approaching the incel phenomenon from different perspectives, this framework has the aim of providing a holistic understanding of the incel community as well as highlighting the importance of the interplay of various individual, ideological, contextual and technological features in the process of online radicalization.

Due to exponential advances in technology, the reach of terrorists’ influence now transcends geographic boundaries and is extremely widespread. Steinbach (2016), in his Statement before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, points out that ‘as technology advances, so, too, does terrorists’ use of technology to communicate – both to inspire and recruit’. In fact, it is no secret that terrorist groups are continuously using the internet to inspire and enlist new members in order to grow their network of terror. This growth of terrorist groups is not limited to those individuals who are recruited and leave their homelands to travel to terrorist hotspots for jihadi purposes (foreign fighters), but also includes residents who are radicalized in their home countries and who remain there to propagate attacks on their home countries (homegrown terrorists).

The Internet and online spaces have come to play a significant role in discussions over both terrorism and methods to counter it. Recent events have highlighted the role that such online spaces and networks can play in irregular violence. The growth of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria came with a canon of slick social media videos and online propaganda, aimed at encouraging individuals from throughout the world to pledge support to Da’esh, participate in the state-building process in as-Sham, or to “stay in place” and commit attacks in their home countries.