Online Library

My dissertation consists of six articles and the framing chapter. The framing
chapter begins with introducing the problem of online identity-creation and lays
bare the tendency of the formation of vernacular webs, which are opposed to
dominant media and state authorities. I point out the major reasons as to why it
is relevant, and highly topical, to study the extreme right grass-roots communities
and their prevalent ways of meaning-making. I also outline the main characteristics
that need to be present for defining some content as being extreme
right. The next sub-chapter gives a brief overview of the research, which has
concentrated on the extreme right communication and identity-creation. I highlight
the works of the critical discourse analysis, cultural studies and semiotics
and bring focus on certain papers that have concentrated on the specifics of the
extreme right online communication. Then I summarize the main purposes and
research emphases of my dissertation. I also explicate the reasons as to why it is
fruitful to apply the frameworks of cultural semiotics for comprehending the
processes of identity-creation of the contemporary extreme right. The next subchapter
introduces the sources that have been analyzed in my papers. I explain
why I concentrated on the particular web pages and how the style and the content
of the observed sources transformed during the years of my studies. Then I
elucidate the reasons why I decided to use the non-participatory covert observation
(as one of my research methods) and also unveil certain ethical dilemmas,
which accompany my research. Finally, I present short summaries of the
papers of this dissertation and envisage some possible future directions for my
research.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

This article examines the radicalization of young adults in relation to internet access and the social media content produced and managed by radical groups in Indonesia. Some of the research problems that become the major concern of this article were how young people respond to the internet and social media that provide radical content, how they find out about and access the content, what their purposes are for accessing radical content, and what they do with the radical content. The data discussed in this article were obtained from surveys and interviews with 700 students from seven state universities in Indonesia who were allegedly exposed to radicalism, according to the National Agency for Combating Terrorism (BNPT). The state universities that became research locations were the University of Indonesia (UI), Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), Bogor Agriculture University (IPB), Diponegoro University (Undip), the Sepuluh Nopember Institute of Technology (ITS), Universitas Airlangga (UNAIR), and the University of Brawijaya (UB). This study revealed that in addition to accessing and consuming various radical content, some students also acted as prosumers. That is, they did not only read, but also produced information related to radicalization, and then recirculated it via social media.

In this study, we select the official websites of four known extremist groups and map the networks of hyperlinked websites forming a virtual community around them. The networks are constructed using a custom-built webcrawler (TENE: Terrorism and Extremism Network Extractor) that searches the HTML of a website for all the hyperlinks inserted directing to other websites (Bouchard et al., 2014). Following all of these hyperlinks out of the initial website of interest produces the network of websites forming a community that is more or less cohesive, more or less extensive, and more or less devoted to the same cause (Bouchard and Westlake, 2016; Westlake and Bouchard, 2016). The extent to which the official website of a group contains many hyperlinks towards external websites may be an indicator of a more active community, and it may be indicative of a more active social movement.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

Hiding true personality behind a facade is one of the basic
tricks adopted by humans who live double lives for illegal purposes. In
particular terrorists have historically adopted the protocol of a facade
behaviour coupled with a second life consisting mainly in illegal activities
and their planning.
Nowadays a few cases of behaviours that hide a dangerous activity, possibly
illegal, behind an apparently neutral and mean public person, can
be replicated, and sometimes just provided, by a social network pro-
file. Recognizing that a social network profile is fake, in some extreme
cases, a bot, and determining the contour relationships that limit such a
condition is one of the most important weapons for terrorism fight.
In this paper we show that what we name the Spider-man protocol, a
set of behaviour rules that bring to hiding a personality behind a facade,
has several weaknesses, and it is prone to a set of attacks that permit to
detect these behaviours. We provide the description of an experimental
architecture that is used for determining violations of the protocol, and
therefore breaches in the secrecy of the individual protection settled by
the terrorists.