Online Library

This book explores the social forces among and between online aggressors that affect the expression and perpetration of online hate. Its chapters illustrate how patterns of interactive social behavior reinforce, magnify, or modify this expression. It also considers the characteristics of social media that facilitate social interactions that promote hate and facilitate relationships among haters. Bringing together a range of international experts and covering an array of themes, including woman abuse, antisemitism, pornography, radicalization, and extreme political youth movements, this book examines the specific social factors and processes that facilitate these forms of hate and proposes new approaches for explaining them. Cutting-edge, interdisciplinary, and authoritative, this book will be of interest to sociologists, criminologists, and scholars of media, communication, and computational social science alike, as well as those engaged with hate crime, hate speech, social media, and online social networks.

While the extreme right wing (ERW) has not gained a foothold in local or national Irish politics, the country has witnessed a growth in online activism and harassment, and physical protest and violence. This paper explores a case study based on 4876 unique posts from one Irish-based Telegram group active during six months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The main findings are that: (a) this group was heavily influenced by foreign content and influencers, in particular, American ERW content and conspiracies associated with QAnon; (b) conspiracy theories were not adopted wholesale but adapted for an Irish audience; (c) Irish actors were not passive receivers of US content, and multi-directional exchanges of ideas were witnessed. While generalising beyond the case study analysed in this paper would require further data, this may suggest that Irish influencers are part of a transnational online ecosystem in which ideas and theories are shared and adapted to local contexts. These findings offer insights into the ERW in Ireland and, more generally, how the ERW communicates and spread conspiracy theories across national borders.

This paper discusses research on QAnon, a controversial conspiracy movement. Its public engagement mechanisms and discursive practices, focusing on members’ activities on Telegram, are analysed. These activities have elevated concerns about the group’s threat to democracy, prompting intelligence agencies to identify it as a potential risk. This study emphasises the need to understand QAnon’s discursive practices for safeguarding democratic foundations. The author aims to demonstrate how linguistics can aid in analysing Political and Military discourse, assisting institutions in countering destabilising movements. The research uses Open Source Intelligence techniques to analyse QAnon members’ activities, disinformation campaigns, and conspiracy theories on Telegram. Positive Discourse Analysis and Netnography allow us to investigate discourse types and construct discoursive paradigms of resistance. The study conducts quantitative and qualitative analyses on a corpus of Telegram channels items to identify recurring themes and semantic areas, shedding light on the differences between Qlobal-Change USA and Qlobal-Change Italia channels.

The article explores the patterning and functioning of attitude semantics in the practice of identity attacks within terrorist communications. Positioned in facework and stance-taking research (e.g. Tracy & Tracy, 1998, 2008, 2017), it introduces the concepts of ‘evaluative textbites’ and ‘attitudinal priming’ to linguistic examinations, advocating a functional approach to unravelling identity attacks, drawing on corpus analysis methods (e.g. word frequency, and concordance-line qualitative analysis) and the Appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005). Findings reveal that, linked with stance-taking activity, attitudinal priming offers insights into how specific ideational targets are primed for particular attitudinal, evaluative functions. Evaluative textbites provide linguistic evidence of an author’s encoded hostile attitude and the nuanced patterning and functioning of ‘ideation-attitude’ co-occurrences in these attacks. Identity attacks are a rhetorical tool, normative and valuation-based, targeting individuals’ or out-groups’ immoral behaviours and devaluing victims by reference to their personal traits, power-distance relationships, interactional roles, and master identities. This article offers implications for future study of identity attacks in hate crimes, genocidal rhetoric, and defamation texts, and strengthens counter-extremism efforts by illuminating the investigative value of identity work.

Research on far-right extremism has grown substantially over the last decade, owing to the rise of Trump, attacks such as the one in Christchurch and Buffalo, as well as the mainstreaming of hate speech and polarization. In addition to research, there have been antifascist activists who have been engaged in doxxing members of the far right who are part of our schools, our militaries, and governments. Releasing the private information of members of far-right movements to the public has created interesting policy and law enforcement dilemmas. With respect to law enforcement, can doxxing be used as a tool to force individuals to disengage from groups? For social media companies, doxxing violates their terms of service, but should an exception be made in these instances since it purportedly serves a public interest? For this paper, we interviewed 10 former members of the far right who have experienced doxxing over the last several years. The paper explores what happened, the immediate and long-term effects of doxxing on their lives, and ongoing challenges of being exposed against their will. We conclude with some policy recommendations related to the costs and benefits of doxxing on these individuals but also society at large.

The ‘involuntary celibates’, or men who have been unable to find romantic or sexual relationships with women despite wanting to, have congregated in the online incel community. Though initially supportive in nature, the community has become a hotbed for (violent) online misogyny. My ongoing virtual ethnographic research focuses on the nature of the incel community and its members, and how the community plays a role in online misogynistic radicalization. To this end, this contribution applies Bayerl et al.’s Radicalisation-Factor Model and its four interlinked factors—the individual, the environment, the radical groups and ideology, and technologies—to the incel community. This adjusted framework find its basis in existing insights from domains such as (online) radicalization, social psychology, scholarship of gender, masculinity and misogyny, and is further inspired by ongoing non-participatory observations on incel forums. By approaching the incel phenomenon from different perspectives, this framework has the aim of providing a holistic understanding of the incel community as well as highlighting the importance of the interplay of various individual, ideological, contextual and technological features in the process of online radicalization.