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At Manchester Crown Court on 18 October 2024, Robert Taylor was sentenced to four years in prison with a one year extended license period for nine offences relating to racial hatred, two terror offences, two offences related to hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation and one case of support for a proscribed organisation.

This Research Briefing is the second in CST’s ‘Pathway to Terror’ series that outlines CST’s specific work in tracking, monitoring and reporting individuals’ online extremism. It has two sections: the first section reveals the full extent of Taylor’s anti-Jewish activity, the ideological extremism that lay behind his offending, and CST’s investigation that led to his arrest and conviction. The second part of this report looks at the GDL network more widely, its links to the UK, its growing presence on X alongside its use of alternative tech platforms, and its role in attempting to radicalise online users globally

The independent Commission for Countering Extremism has published a legal review, to examine whether existing legislation adequately deals with hateful extremism.

In this report, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and CASM Technology provide a data-driven snapshot of the online activities of extremists with a demonstrable link to New Zealand, as well as the digital platforms connecting New Zealand to an international extremist ecosystem.

The Western Balkans faces a double challenge from online extremism. Online platforms are facilitating the specific targeting of the region by diverse international extremist narratives. Meanwhile regional histories and geopolitics are being appropriated to justify extremist actions and narratives around the world. This is part of a wider trend that underscores the growing challenge posed by the proliferation of transnational extremist ideologies on online platforms, both violent jihadist and extreme right wing. In the Western Balkans, this poses a number of specific risks. While the issue of the prevention, mitigation, and regulation of online extremism is a global one, there are a number of region-specific considerations relevant to effective policy and practitioner responses.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) concerns itself with the issue of its citizens becoming radicalized and joining extremist groups. Daesh is one such group that is able to attract people from varying backgrounds to commit violent acts of terror. Moreover, Daesh encourages those in the West to migrate to their controlled territory to participate in the ongoing conflict in Syria and Iraq. The group relies on women to participate in this migration so that they can marry jihadis and raise the next generation of supporters. This paper examines how Daesh radicalizes these women, specifically second-generation Muslim women in the UK. Daesh uses social media to radicalize recruits and this holds true in their strategy for incorporating women into their self-declared caliphate. Once women have migrated to Daesh-controlled territory, they themselves act as radicalization agents via social media. This paper uses Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities as a way of formulating how Daesh constructs its own community through pseudo-nationalism that is able to radicalize young people in the West who are part of a diasporic group and do not have particularly strong ties to their ancestral culture and religion. To facilitate the radicalization of secondgeneration Muslim women in the UK, Daesh uses social media to establish a particular image of the caliphate through this pseudo-nationalism. This paper uses a case study of Amira Abase, Shamima Begum, and Kadiza Sultana, or the ‘Bethnal Green Girls’, to explore the radicalization of SGMW via social media.

This book explores how ordinary Arab-speaking social media users have reacted to propaganda from the Islamic State, rather than how IS propaganda has targeted ordinary users, thus providing a change in perspective in the literature. The authors provide a comprehensive account of the evolution of the Arabic discourse on IS, encompassing all phases of the Caliphate’s political evolution, from the apogee of the Islamic State in October 2014 to the loss of its unofficial capital of Raqqa in September 2017. Taking into account key events, the book also considers the most recurrent topics for IS and its opponents who engage in the Twitter conversation. The analysis is based on around 29 million tweets written in the Arabic language, representing a random sample of around one-third of all Arabic tweets referring to IS over the 2014-2017 timeframe.