Online Library

VOX-Pol Blog post.

It is well established that jihadist groups and their supporters post URLs on online platforms to outlink to items of propaganda stored on other platforms. Industry initiatives – such as Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism’s inclusion of URLs in its hash-sharing database, and Tech Against Terrorism’s Terrorist Content Analytics Platform – have sought to counter this practice. These measures, together with new regulatory regimes (e.g. the EU’s Terrorist Content Online Regulation) and the growing use of decentralised services, raise the question whether jihadist groups’ propaganda dissemination strategies are perhaps being forced to evolve. This report considers whether there is evidence of such an evolution, by examining the means that three jihadist groups (Islamic State (IS), Al-Qaeda (AQ) and Al-Shabaab) used to disseminate their propaganda during a two-month period in early 2023.

The association between 4chan and online extremist subcultures has seen increasing academic scrutiny—particularly following the 2019 Christchurch attack by a right-wing terrorist who frequented the anonymous forums. Gender-based extremism features as one (of many) critical subcultures that commands our academic attention, though few studies to date have sought to capture and assess the entire landscape of this phenomenon on 4chan’s most notorious board: /pol/. Drawing on a pre-Christchurch attack dataset extracted from Papasavva et al. (2020), this study investigates how Australians and New Zealanders (ANZ) broadly conceptualize—and debate—women, gender, and sexual violence on 4chan’s /pol/ board. We apply a mixed-methods approach, combining automated machine learning tools alongside expert qualitative analysis. Across nearly 300,000 posts and comments, we show how gender is constructed within this community, and the conjugal order they demand as a result. This order racially and sexually defines gender identities and norms, which are perceived as mechanisms to restore power and dominance to an ethnically and ideologically conforming in-group. Those that violate or disrupt the conjugal order are legitimized as targets of sexual, and gender-based violence. This normalizes far/extreme right gendered constructs across ANZ contexts in support of exclusivist far/extreme right ideological positions.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

What explains the rise and fall of far-right Islamist protest mobilization in contemporary Indonesia? The 2016-2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election witnessed significant growth in support for and mobilization of the far-right. While far-right Islamist mobilization has occurred regularly since the fall of the authoritarian Suharto regime in 1998, its longevity and impact on electoral politics has historically been limited. I maintain that the 2016 far-right Islamist protest mobilization was enabled and disabled by the dynamic relationship between hybrid media and hybrid movement strategies. Hybrid thinking serves as a platform for understanding the increasingly diverse and complex nature of Islamist mobilization, generating new ways of exploring some of the classic concerns of social movement studies and technology. Moreover, previous research on the far-right primarily focuses on electoral and party politics, while studies on social movements and technologies often fall into technological determinism, providing only a limited understanding of one of the most pressing issues of our time. This study proposes an innovative analytic strategy to understand the complexity of contemporary Islamist protest mobilization, creating a hybrid movement that effectively spans different movements, constituencies, and institutions, all coexisting within a hybrid media environment that deftly merges elements of old and newer media logics to influence participation, collaboration, and coordination in the spheres of social movements and protest politics.

In this article we describe our five-year research project on the notorious radical free speech service and fringe platform Gab. During these years we scraped an entire platform, prepared it into a dataset for analysis, and opened it up to a broader community of students and researchers. Each of these projects provides us not just with a small slice of platformized far-right culture but also with a larger sphere of a fringe platform. However, the overarching goal of the Gab project was to contribute to a methodology for the study of the contemporary platformized far right. The atypical nature of the project posed many methodological, epistemological, and legal challenges. It therefore kicked off an institutional learning process about the possibilities, legal boundaries, and best practices for research compliant with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In this article we argue that the study of the platformized far right should have a thorough understanding of the medium on which the object is present, as well as the methods with which the object is captured. What is more, scholars that use digital tools and data methods for capture and analysis of web platforms must become literate in operating them. Consequently, data-driven research on the far right is naturally interdisciplinary and therefore cooperative and adherent to the principles of open science.