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Online social networks have become a powerful venue for political activism. In many cases large, insular online communities form that have been shown to be powerful diffusion mechanisms of both misinformation and propaganda. In some cases, these groups users advocate actions or policies that could be construed as extreme along nearly any distribution of opinion and are thus called Online Extremist Communities (OECs). Although these communities appear increasingly common, little is known about how these groups form or the methods used to influence them. The work in this thesis provides researchers a methodological framework to study these groups by answering three critical research questions:
• How can we detect large dynamic online activist or extremist communities?
• What automated tools are used to build, isolate, and influence these communities?
• What methods can be used to gain novel insight into large online activist or extremist communities?
This group members social ties can be inferred based on the various affordances offered by OSNs for group curation. By developing heterogeneous, annotated graph representations of user behavior I can efficiently extract online activist discussion cores using an ensemble of unsupervised machine learning methods. I call this technique Ensemble Agreement Clustering. Through manual inspection, these discussion cores can then often be used as training data to detect the larger community. I present a novel supervised learning algorithm called Multiplex Vertex Classification for network bipartition on heterogeneous, annotated graphs. This methodological pipeline has also proven useful for social botnet detection, and a study of large, complex social botnets used for propaganda dissemination is provided as well. Throughout this thesis, I provide Twitter case studies including communities focused on the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), the ongoing Syrian Revolution, the Euromaidan Movement in Ukraine, as well as the alt-Right.

This paper offers a set of specific proposals for better describing harmful content online and for reducing the damage it causes, while protecting freedom of expression. The ideas are mainly meant for OSPs since they regulate the vast majority of online content; taken together they operate the largest system of censorship the world has ever known, controlling more human communication than any government. Governments, for their part, have tried to berate or force the companies into changing their policies, with limited and often repressive results. For these reasons, this paper focuses on what OSPs should do to diminish harmful content online. The proposals focus on the rules that form the basis of each regulation system, as well as on other crucial steps in the regulatory process, such as communicating rules to platform users, giving multiple stakeholders a role in regulation, and enforcement of the rules.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

This study considers the ways that overt hate speech and covert discriminatory practices circulate on Facebook despite its official policy that prohibits hate speech. We argue that hate speech and discriminatory practices are not only explained by users’ motivations and actions, but are also formed by a network of ties between the platform’s policy, its technological affordances, and the communicative acts of its users. Our argument is supported with longitudinal multimodal content and network analyses of data extracted from official Facebook pages of seven extreme-right political parties in Spain between 2009 and 2013. We found that the Spanish extreme-right political parties primarily implicate discrimination, which is then taken up by their followers who use overt hate speech in the comment space.

The Handbook is divided into seven self-contained chapters, which build on each other but also allow the reader to jump in at any point, depending on their interests. Specific content may also be found using the keyword index. The seven chapters are distributed between the Handbook’s two main parts, each of which has a specific focus. A third, supplementary section consists of a selection of additional articles on relevant topics. Part 1, consisting of Chapters 1 to 4, deals with the theoretical foundations of violent extremism prevention under the key topics of ‘theoretical references’, ‘phenomenology’, ‘radicalisation processes’ and ‘evaluation’. Part 2 comprises Chapters 5 to 7 and places the focus on violent extremism prevention practice in Germany. This section deals with the approaches practised here, existing prevention programmes and the current prevention landscape. Chapters 1 to 7, which cover what we could call the main body of violent extremism prevention, are supplemented by a third section comprising excurses into complementary questions and areas of society which, although not explicitly considered part of the field of violent extremism prevention itself, nevertheless influence the occurrence of radicalisation and the diverse manifestations of politically and/or religiously motivated extremisms. The topics touched upon there include conflict transformation, the media, criminal law, mobile counselling, civic education, football culture, Islamic associations, victim counselling and ethics.

A framework for understanding Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS)’s apocalyptic theology as an internal strategy to “coercively radicalize” its captive subjects is presented, by comparison to the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which shares key stages of captive indoctrination with ISIS. A violent experience of “entry,” religious rules learned in an “assimilation” process, and millenarian “grand narratives” framing violence as purification, are examined. These stages construct an image of group leaders as divinely endowed with spiritual knowledge and access (i.e., charismatic authority). This can create a sense of dependency on the leaders and their instructions, potentially motivating violent and altruistic behavior from initially unwilling subjects.