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Social media platforms, such as Instagram, are regularly misused for spreading covert (Islamic) extremist propaganda. Affect and emotion are central tools used in extremist propaganda, but there is little research into the combined employment of different social media elements, such as hashtags, visuals, and texts, in the context of propaganda. This study contributes to closing this gap. Using the German group Generation Islam as a case study, we examined the group’s Instagram activity (N = 1,187 posts) over the course of 2 years. To reflect the platform users’ logic, we (a) examined affect in hashtag networks in which users can come across propagandistic content, (b) employed deep learning to examine the emotional valence transmitted in the visuals, and (c) used automated linguistic analysis to describe collective action cues contained within the texts. The results are novel, as they provide nuanced insights into extremist propaganda’s employment of affect and emotions across Instagram’s affordances.

This report draws on existing literature; fresh interviews with gamers, gaming company executives, and experts; and findings from a multinational survey of gamers conducted in January 2023.

Social Media and Terrorism are often studied together and have become the focus of many authors in recent years. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate international publication trends on social media and terrorism, using the Scopus database through bibliometric analysis from 2009 to 2022. Data visualization and analysis were conducted using Microsoft Excel and VOSviewer. The results showed that the international publications trend reached a peak in 2018, with 103 publications emphasizing various topics, such as social media, terrorism, Twitter, terrorist attacks, and several issues related to terrorist activities and digital platforms. The United States was also the most common country of publication with the highest number of affiliated authors. In addition, the authors with the most published documents were Tsikrika T. and Vrochidis S., with the majority of reports prioritizing social sciences. These results are expected to contribute to the novelty of previous studies on social media and terrorism.

Realizing that after the COVID-19 pandemic learner and faculty engagement is even more critical to learning—as evidenced by ongoing declines in post-pandemic post-secondary enrollment—this paper presents a series of reflections and experiences from the perspective of a student and faculty member. These experiences are understood through an autoethnography, resulting in the creation of a feedback framework fostering community in online environments. Through self-study, critical reflection of educational theory with practice, and lived experiences, both the student and faculty member describe the formative steps leading to the adaptive creation and implementation of community in the online learning setting. The pandemic, coupled with an intentional shift to a new learning management system (LMS), underscored the criticality of adaptations in teaching and learning. The resulting framework is a model for emphasizing the connection between technology, community, and appreciative andragogy.

This thesis explores how extremism manages to survive in moderated online spaces. This work follows the attempts of the Instagram platform to minimize the presence of the right-wing extremist groups, specifically the Boogaloo movement, as a means of understanding how such groups survive and proselytize in the face of censorship. Addressing this question is done through the use of a multi-sited virtual ethnography spanning the Instagram Boogaloo community, Telegram channels and other external links shared by the accounts within the sample group over the course of two years. Publicly available posts from relevant accounts were archived and subject to content analysis to provide a baseline understanding of the group’s ideology and determine existing and emergent themes in order to demonstrate the evolution of the group. Collection and analysis was a concurrent and cyclical process which yielded a deeper understanding of the Boogaloo movement’s ideology and the meaning behind the symbols employed by the group. Furthermore, the results of this work showcase that the longer the Boogaloo movement spent circumnavigating censorship, the more the group began to resemble other successful extremist groups. Subsequently the analysis was informed by social movement theory and new institutionalism to explain how extremist groups approach adversity and uncertainty in a similar fashion to how institutions behave, which ultimately leads to homogenization.

Tech platforms have been through several regulatory phases concerning the countering of terrorist content on their platforms: from a lack of regulation, to the government demands of self-regulation, to the present day where regulation has been implemented across the world. Much of this regulation, however, has been heavily criticised. After consideration of these criticisms, and research into regulatory approaches in a range of other industries, this article proposes a responsive regulatory approach to countering online terrorist content. Responsive regulation argues that regulation should be responsive to specific industry structure because different structures are conducive to different degrees and forms of regulation. This article categorizes tech platforms based on different compliance issues: awareness and expertise; capacity; and willingness. It then proposes four regulatory tracks in response, in order to try to mitigate the occurrence of these compliance issues.