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Much research has focused on the role of the alt-right in pushing far-right narratives into mainstream discourse. In this work, we focus on the alt-right’s effects on extremist narratives themselves. From 2012 to 2017, we find a rise in alt-right, 4chan-like discourse styles across multiple communication platforms known for white supremacist extremism, such as Stormfront. This discourse style incorporates inflammatory insults, irreverent comments, and talk about memes and online “chan” culture itself. A network analysis of one far-right extremist platform suggests that central users adopt and spread this alt-right style. This analysis has implications for understanding influence and change in online white supremacist extremism, as well as the role of style in white supremacist communications. Warning: This paper contains examples of hateful and offensive language.

Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-lockdown movements sparked concerns about online extremism escalating into real-world violence. This study takes the Australian anti-lockdown movement to explore extremist discourse in Australia, as it contained several, overlapping and interacting extremisms. This study explores the labelling of these protests as extreme and examines the interplay between individuals, ideologies and discourse. Understanding the definitions and labels of extremism is fundamental for identifying and countering potential threats, as it distinguishes harmful rhetoric from extremist discourse and enables precise, informed interventions. A qualitative close reading revealed that while Australian anti-lockdown discourse contained crisis narratives and group antagonisms, it did not consistently meet the structural definition of extremism. This is partly due to the problem of coding violence, which lies in the lack of a clear comparative threshold to determine whether a discursive claim, rhetoric, or cultural reference signifies violence or violent intent. While not meeting the structural definition of extremism, there was evidence of specific structural attributes that logically precede extremism and the emergence of violence. By reconceptualizing extremism as a temporal dynamic, this research explores the relationship between discursive and violent extremism, shedding light on the complexities of extremist movements and their social impact.

This working paper explores trends in extremist Facebook data from July 2023 to June 2024. We examined engagement, sentiment, and topics within Facebook groups categorized as anti-Israel/Semitic, anti-Palestine/Muslim, and anti-both, mapping these trends against five major events related to the recent Israel-Hamas conflict. Our findings support the hypothesis that shifts in trends correspond with these key events, showing varying patterns across different group categories. We observed decreased activity proportion in anti-both groups and increased activity proportion in the two one-sided hate groups at the conflict’s onset. This pattern reversed after the Israeli troop withdrawal from Khan Yunis, Gaza. During the conflict, negative content proportion surged, and neutral content proportion fell in all the three group categories. Anti-Palestine/Muslim groups’ discourses shifted from religious to social media activism and political/protest around the time the war began, while anti-Israel/Semitic groups moved from political/protest to religious topics a couple of weeks before the war.

There has been an increased focus on reducing hate, harassment, and extremist exploitation in digital games through solutions from community management, trust and safety, and design perspectives. Despite this attention, the industry lacks basic standards around these issues and efforts in this area are stymied by the ubiquity of “toxic gamer culture” and fears in the industry about discussing extremism and hate within games. Today, a patchwork of strategies and tools exist. In this study, focus groups with industry professionals were conducted to increase understanding of industry professional’s perceptions of these problems and solutions. Several primary themes regarding solutions emerged: game and social system design strategies, moderation and player report strategies, and wish list solutions.

Scholars have increasingly sought commonalities among Islamist radical groups, such as ISIS and Boko Haram, despite their ideological differences. The purpose of this qualitative study is to conduct a comprehensive analysis of both ISIS and Boko Haram’s digital campaigns to identify similarities and differences in the content of their digital messaging. Adopting reflexive thematic analysis to explore and interpret dataset which eventually allows to uncover patterns, themes, and meanings within the data, this study, utilized the “propaganda by deed” theory to examines and analyse 20 ISIS Arabic Twitter campaigns and 20 Boko Haram video messages. Data was collected and employed to NVivo software for coding and analysis. The analysis reveals four prominent themes for each group: ISIS emphasizes recruitment, direct calls to jihad, religious discourse, and commemoration of deceased members to attract or mobilize followers. In contrast, Boko Haram’s themes include ideological declarations, religious narratives, affiliations with other groups, and recruitment with calls to jihad. These findings provide a nuanced understanding of both groups, with improved quality for digital campaign in the side of Boko Haram as a result of its allegiance with ISIS, informing more effective and appropriate countermeasures against them and further prevent possible future direct relationship between the two groups.