Online Library

The growth of the online ‘manosphere’ has raised significant concerns regarding the movement’s highly misogynistic discourses and related lone offender attacks perpetrated by incels. This article employs a digital ethnography approach to examine r/IncelExit and r/ExRedPill, two forums dedicated to assisting individuals leave the manosphere. Utilizing a gendered perspective, this study delves into narratives from these forums to engage with theoretical debates on the conceptual need to recognize masculine agency. Key focus areas include exploring the radicalization and deradicalization processes, along with examination of narratives from individuals who use these subreddits to divert from joining the manosphere.

Online extremism remains a persistent problem despite the best efforts of governments, tech companies and civil society. Digital technologies can induce group polarization to promote extremism and cause substantial changes to extremism (e.g., create new forms of extremism, types of threats or radicalization approaches). Current methods to counter extremism induce undesirable side‐effects (e.g., ostracize minorities, inadvertently promote extremism) or do not leverage the full potential of digital technologies. Extremism experts recognize the need for researchers from other disciplines, like information systems, to contribute their technical expertise for understanding and countering online extremism. This article aims to introduce the field of information systems to the issue of online extremism. Information systems scholars address technology‐related societal issues from a sociotechnical perspective. The sociotechnical perspective describes systems through a series of interactions between social (structure, people) and technical components (physical system, task). We apply the sociotechnical perspective to (1) summarize the current state‐of‐the‐art knowledge of 222 articles in a systematic multi‐disciplinary literature review and (2) propose specific research questions that address two questions (How do digital technologies augment extremism? How can we successfully counter online extremism?).

The article explores Bitchute, a video-hosting platform associated with the Far/Alt Right, with the aim of understanding how it reconfigures political communication and the digital public sphere. Methodologically, the article employs the walkthrough method and non-participant observation to identify the main features and functionalities offered to users. These include a set of values that prioritise creators, an algorithmic organisation that keeps users engaged with a single creator channel rather than with the same topic across channels; and embedded buttons for tips and pledges for creators enabling them to directly monetise their content. The content posted on Bitchute tends to coalesce around politicised cultural issues. It is noteworthy that although Bitchute hosts some advertising, it does not use data for microtargeting and in general makes limited use of user data. We interpret these findings as suggesting that Bitchute constitutes a media infrastructure that encourages, incentivises and sustains microcelebrities of the Far/Alt Right, who act as ideology entrepreneurs. Bitchute can therefore be seen as an infrastructure for the multiplication/sustenance of ideological entrepreneurs/political influencers who vie for the attention and money of far-right publics. If we can speak of a structural transformation of the public sphere associated with Alt Tech, our discussion of Bitchute suggests that this takes the form of a political media infrastructure that enables the continued existence and consolidation of a new type of political actor, the ideology entrepreneur.

This document sets up the main recommendations identified through the three years of engagement and dialouge on this topic. It is anchored in the discussions from the round tables. It further builds on the experiences from UN field presences that are working to address these challenges at country level. The paper is the result of a cooperation between my Office and the ESRC Human Rights, Big Data and Technology Project at the University of Essex. I would like to especially thank Ahmed Shaheed, Deputy Director, Essex Human Rights, Big Data and Technology Project and former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief for this partnership over the last several years and which has resulted in this policy paper.

Measuring extremist behavior and discourse online presents a significant methodological challenge largely due to the volume of content. This paper assesses the extent to which discourse communities created by extremists identified through qualitative analysis in prior research are present in a novel Telegram dataset and can be identified through Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling and network analysis. It then compares the results of Louvian and Girvan-Newman network community detection methods and the topics assigned to each community to see if the underlying structure of association between topics is robust to the use of different community detection methods. The results indicate that it may be possible to map discourse communities through topic modeling and network analysis. However, the comparison of the algorithms is inconclusive. This work contributes to our understanding of how computational social science methods can be used to measure and analyze extremist use of the Internet at scale.