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As terrorist, extremist, and hateful content has become widespread on social media, platforms have responded with content moderation – the flagging, review, and enforcement of rules and standards on user-generated content online. This chapter provides an introduction to contemporary content moderation practices, technologies, and contexts and outlines key debates in the field. The chapter explores the changing regulatory context around hate speech and terrorist content online in the EU. This changing context, such as Germany’s NetzDG law and the EU’s 2021 regulation on terrorist content online, is setting new standards and statutory requirements for platforms and websites. While content moderation is a form of self-regulation run by companies themselves, the regulatory context is shifting towards multistakeholder governance. This chapter then maps key stakeholders and technologies in content moderation as they pertain to radicalisation, looking at trusted flaggers, Internet Referral Units, and automated content moderation. After providing an overview of the regulatory context, stakeholders, and technologies in content moderation, the chapter explores normative questions about deplatforming, how transparency hinders research and accountability in content moderation, and explores inconsistencies in the enforcement of content moderation rules, particularly in the case of the far right. By providing an outline of the regulatory context, mapping multistakeholder arrangements in content moderation, and exploring key debates, this chapter provides readers with an introduction to the growing literature on content moderation and countering radicalisation.

Counter-radicalisation is resource-hungry; policy development and implementation, interventions through the criminal justice system, and bespoke one-to-one engagements outside of it are all costly. In contrast, counter narrative campaigns ostensibly offer a simpler proposition. By engaging with various audiences, campaigners from both the state and civil society can seek to reduce the number of people turning to extremism, question their commitment where they do engage, and ultimately hasten their exit. Despite this allure, the reality of counter narrative campaigns is a conceptually confusing landscape, sometimes based on sketchy theoretical understandings and limited evidence on outcomes.

This chapter provides an overview of counter narratives. It begins by setting out some of the alternative conceptualisations, such as counter and alternative messaging. Building on this, it then identifies some of the theoretical underpinnings of different approaches and explores some of the tools that campaigners use in different settings. It then goes on to look in more depth at how counter narrative campaigning has been evaluated previously, and emergent normative questions around the practice.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.