Online Library

Emerging alongside the progression of women’s rights in the twenty-first century is the development of the men’s rights movement, parts of which have culminated into the contemporary ‘manosphere.’ Consisting of online communities that ascribe to misogynistic ideologies, which objectify, disparage, and dehumanise women, the manosphere also houses those who identify as involuntary celibate (incel).

This chapter will examine the role of the Internet and associated technology such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing (CC) in the process of radicalisation to terrorism and violent extremism. Particular emphasis will be placed upon the role of online environments in facilitating communication and the spread of extremist ideology, as opposed to operational and strategic recruiting functions of the Internet. Before assessing the debate, this chapter shall define two key concepts, radicalisation and violent extremism. Firstly, the chapter will provide an assessment of academic literature that has perpetuated a false offline and online dichotomy. Then, the chapter will demonstrate the new communicative role of technology within violent extremist movements since the emergence of Web 2.0. Following this, Sageman’s (Leaderless Jihad: Terror networks in the twenty-first century, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) ‘bunch of guys’ bottom-up framework will be employed to understand how the process of radicalisation can be facilitated and amplified by the digital age, referring to the concepts of moral outrage, othering, virtual communities and echo chambers. Lastly, contemporary literature that considers the interplay between online and offline domains will be explored.

With the advent of social media, terrorist organisations have seized an unprecedented opportunity to engage wider audiences with their ideologies and actions. This study aims to develop an understanding of this tactic by analysing its use in the 2013 Westgate Mall hostage crisis. During that event, the Twitter account @HSMPress_ provided continuous updates supporting the actions of the terrorist organisation Al- Shabaab. Situating the event within a framework of Jürgen Habermas’s theories of the Public Sphere and Andrew Mack’s theories of asymmetric warfare, this paper employs Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad to perform a rhetorical analysis of the tweets using both artistic and inartistic factors. It does so in order to understand how they engaged the audience of the terrorist event, emphasising the performative nature of the text in accordance with behaviourist objectives. The results of this analysis will demonstrate how terrorist groups may use platforms like Twitter to achieve a strategic political goal by shifting viewer perspectives, with significant implications for future policy governing social media content and censorship.

Social media has been remarkably effective in bringing together groups of individuals at a scale and speed unthinkable just a few years ago. While there is a positive aspect of digital activism in raising awareness and mobilizing for equitable societal outcomes, it is equally true that social media has a dark side in enabling political polarization and radicalization. This paper highlights that algorithmic bias and algorithmic manipulation accentuate these developments. We review some of the key technological aspects of social media and its impact on society, while also outlining remedies and implications for regulation. For the purpose of this paper we will define a digital platform as a technology intermediary that enables interaction between groups of users (such as Amazon or Google) and a social media platform as a digital platform for social media.

White supremacists and the Far Right political movement in the UK have, had considerable success in spreading their messages through Web sites. Some of these Web sites clearly contribute to an enabling environment for racially motivated violence in our towns and cities and possibly help to underpin also the rise of, and support for, the Far Right in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. From a position that acknowledges the enduring issue of white hegemony in Western societies, this paper provides a number of research-based recommendations for further research and future policy and practice in tackling white supremacist racial hatred on the Net.

The development of information technology has changed the nature of conflicts by creating an additional layer of complexity to traditional battle spaces. Nearly global access to the virtual environment has created numerous opportunities to conduct battles online affecting events in both the physical domain, such as computer systems, and in the cognitive domain of people’s attitudes and beliefs. Recently we have witnessed how both states and non-state actors use hybrid approaches to pursue their political and military aims, skilfully combining military operations with cyber-attacks, diplomatic and/or economic pressure, and information (propaganda) campaigns. Over the past decade, social media has rapidly grown into one of the main channels of communication used today. Virtual communication platforms have become an integral part of warfare strategy. The recent conflicts in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine have demonstrated that social media is widely used to coordinate actions, collect information, and, most importantly, to influence the beliefs and attitudes of target audiences, even mobilise them for action. Given this state of affairs, the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (NATO StratCom COE) was tasked with looking into how state and non-state actors leverage social media as a tool for conflict and hybrid warfare strategies. The following topics will be addressed in the report:
• What is the role of social media in hybrid warfare? How is it ‘weaponised’?
• What techniques and tactics do state and non-state actors employ to support their political and military aims using social media? What effects can they achieve?
• What can NATO and its member nations do to identify and counter the malicious use of social media?
We hope that this paper will serve as a comprehensive introduction and useful educational material for anyone interested in understanding the complexity of today’s information environment, and specifically the techniques of influence used in the digital space. The report summarises the conclusions of research commissioned by the StratCom COE—Internet trolling as hybrid warfare tool: the case of Latvia by the Latvian Institute of International Affairs (LIIA) in cooperation with Riga Stradiņš University,1 Social influence in Russia-Ukraine-conflictrelated communication in social media by a team of Polish researchers,2 Network of terror: how Daesh uses adaptive social networks to spread its message by Joseph Shaheen, US State Department Fellow at the StratCom COE, as well as discussions from the seminars and conferences conducted by the COE over the course of 2015.