Online terrorism has been subject to significant change over the past twenty years. An appreciation of the roles of the Internet in terrorism was, like the Web itself, still nascent at the time of 9/11. An early focus on cyberterrorism was nevertheless, even then, giving way to a realisation that the Internet’s affordances were already altering the extremism and terrorism landscape. Some of the earliest work in this area was on extremist and terrorist websites and their purposes.
Extremist and terrorist websites never really went away, they were just overlooked for a decade by researchers and others due to a not unwarranted narrowing of focus to social media platforms and, latterly, messaging applications and adjacent online spaces.
While there is less reliance on websites by extremists and terrorists than there once was, websites remain an important component of the contemporary online extremist and terrorist ecosystem(s) and could re-emerge more strongly with accelerated disruption of extremist and terrorist content and accounts by social media platforms and adjacent services unless providers further down ‘the tech stack’ take more concerted action.
