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As terrorist, extremist, and hateful content has become widespread on social media, platforms have responded with content moderation – the flagging, review, and enforcement of rules and standards on user-generated content online. This chapter provides an introduction to contemporary content moderation practices, technologies, and contexts and outlines key debates in the field. The chapter explores the changing regulatory context around hate speech and terrorist content online in the EU. This changing context, such as Germany’s NetzDG law and the EU’s 2021 regulation on terrorist content online, is setting new standards and statutory requirements for platforms and websites. While content moderation is a form of self-regulation run by companies themselves, the regulatory context is shifting towards multistakeholder governance. This chapter then maps key stakeholders and technologies in content moderation as they pertain to radicalisation, looking at trusted flaggers, Internet Referral Units, and automated content moderation. After providing an overview of the regulatory context, stakeholders, and technologies in content moderation, the chapter explores normative questions about deplatforming, how transparency hinders research and accountability in content moderation, and explores inconsistencies in the enforcement of content moderation rules, particularly in the case of the far right. By providing an outline of the regulatory context, mapping multistakeholder arrangements in content moderation, and exploring key debates, this chapter provides readers with an introduction to the growing literature on content moderation and countering radicalisation.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

Considerable attention has been paid by researchers to social media platforms, especially the ‘big companies’, and increasingly also messaging applications, and how effectively they moderate extremist and terrorist content on their services. Much less attention has yet been paid to if and how infrastructure and service providers, further down ‘the tech stack’, deal with extremism and terrorism. Content Delivery Networks (CDN) such as Cloudflare play an underestimated role in moderating the presence of extremist and terrorist content online as it is impossible for these websites to operate without DDoS protection. This is evidenced by the takedown of a wide range websites such as The Daily Stormer, 8chan, a variety of Taliban websites and more recently the organised harassment site Kiwifarms following refusal of service by Cloudflare. However, it is unclear whether there is any formal process of content review conducted by the company when it decides to refuse services. This article aims to first provide an analysis of what extremist and terrorist websites make use of Cloudflare’s services as well as other CDNs, and how many of them have been subject to takedown following refusal of service. Following this the article analyses CDNs’ terms of service and how current and upcoming internet regulation applies to these CDNs.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

Casi 1.5 millón de personas emplean Facebook en todo el mundo. Aunque la mayoría de las usuarios utilizan el sitio con fines positivos, algunos emplean la plataforma con malas intenciones. En este sentido, Facebook ha creado las normas de la comunidad, un conjunto de políticas que detalla qué tipo de contenido es apropiado publicar y qué queda prohibido. Por ejemplo, Facebook prohíbe y elimina contenido que incite al odio, que define como “contenido que ataca directamente a individuos en función de su raza, origen étnico, nacionalidad, religión, orientación sexual, sexo, género, identidad de género, discapacidad grave o enfermedades”. A pesar de que la incitación al odio está prohibida, en ocasiones ciertos usuarios publican contenido desagradable o perturbador que no infringe las políticas de Facebook.

Para contrarrestar ese tipo de contenido desagradable o extremista, Facebook ha declarado públicamente que el contenido compensatorio (y las herramientas que su plataforma ofrece para promoverlo) desempeñan un papel fundamental en la lucha contra dichas malas prácticas. Facebook opina que esta forma de atajar el problema no es sólo resulta potencialmente más eficaz, sino que además es más probable que tenga éxito a largo plazo.

Recent terrorist attacks carried out on behalf of ISIS on American and European soil by lone wolf attackers or sleeper cells remind us of the importance of understanding the dynamics of radicalization mediated by social media communication channels. In this paper, we shed light on the social media activity of a group of twenty-five thousand users whose association with ISIS online radical propaganda has been manually verified. By using a computational tool known as dynamic activity-connectivity maps, based on network and temporal activity patterns, we investigate the dynamics of social influence within ISIS supporters. We finally quantify the effectiveness of ISIS propaganda by determining the adoption of extremist content in the general population and draw a parallel between radical propaganda and epidemics spreading, highlighting that information broadcasters and influential ISIS supporters generate highly-infectious cascades of information contagion. Our findings will help generate effective countermeasures to combat the group and other forms of online extremism.