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Crowdfunding platforms remain understudied as conduits for ideological struggle. While other social media platforms may enable the expression of hateful and harmful ideas, crowdfunding can actively facilitate their enaction through financial support. In addressing such risks, crowdfunding platforms attempt to mitigate complicity but retain legitimacy. That is, ensuring their fundraising tools are not exploited for intolerant, violent or hate-based purposes, yet simultaneously avoiding restrictive policies that undermine their legitimacy as ‘open’ platforms. Although social media platforms are routinely scrutinized for enabling misinformation, hateful rhetoric and extremism, crowdfunding has largely escaped critical inquiry, despite being repeatedly implicated in amplifying such threats. Drawing on the ‘Freedom Convoy’ movement as a case study, this article employs critical discourse analysis to trace how crowdfunding platforms reveal their underlying values in privileging either collective safety or personal liberty when hosting divisive causes. The radically different policy decisions adopted by crowdfunding platforms GoFundMe and GiveSendGo expose a concerning divide between ‘Big Tech’ and ‘Alt-Tech’ platforms regarding what harms they are willing to risk, and the ideological rationales through which these determinations are made. There remain relatively few regulatory safeguards guiding such impactful strategic choices, leaving crowdfunding platforms susceptible to weaponization. With Alt-Tech platforms aspiring to build an ‘alternative internet’, this paper highlights the urgent need to explore digital constitutionalism in the crowdfunding space, establishing firmer boundaries to better mitigate fundraising platforms becoming complicit in catastrophic harms.

This article examines the problem of hate and toxic behavior in gaming. Videogames have risen to become a dominant cultural form, seeing significant increases in players, playtime, and revenue. More people are playing games than ever before, broadening “gamers” into a highly diverse demographic. Yet this rise has been accompanied by a growing recognition of the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other forms of harassment taking place on these platforms. Hate within gaming creates toxic communities and takes a toll particularly on marginalized groups, raising both ethical and financial issues for the industry, who seek to address this problem in multiple ways. This paper surveys and synthesizes recent research on the topic from both inside and outside academia, laying out the problem, its manifestations, key drivers, and current responses. It concludes with a research agenda that offers a foundation for researchers, policy-makers, and companies to build from.

Digital media platforms have been implicated in the recent rise of far-right extremism. This study proposes that these platforms afford emotional processes that lie at the core of far-right movements. Drawing on Randall Collins’ interactional framework and the literature on cultural trauma, we investigate the emotional processes triggered by traumatic experiences within far-right online communities. As a case, we examine how the white supremacist community Stormfront responded to the 2008 election of Barack Obama, by analyzing the complete datasets of discussion on the forum through a combination of computational methods and qualitative analysis. Our findings suggest that the community functioned as a “emotional refuge”, where members collectively interpreted and transformed their emotional reactions, thereby shaping an emotionally energized collective with a focused target of collective action.

Considerable attention has been paid by researchers to social media platforms, especially the ‘big companies’, and increasingly also messaging applications, and how effectively they moderate extremist and terrorist content on their services. Much less attention has yet been paid to if and how infrastructure and service providers, further down ‘the tech stack’, deal with extremism and terrorism. Content Delivery Networks (CDN) such as Cloudflare play an underestimated role in moderating the presence of extremist and terrorist content online as it is impossible for these websites to operate without DDoS protection. This is evidenced by the takedown of a wide range websites such as The Daily Stormer, 8chan, a variety of Taliban websites and more recently the organised harassment site Kiwifarms following refusal of service by Cloudflare. However, it is unclear whether there is any formal process of content review conducted by the company when it decides to refuse services. This article aims to first provide an analysis of what extremist and terrorist websites make use of Cloudflare’s services as well as other CDNs, and how many of them have been subject to takedown following refusal of service. Following this the article analyses CDNs’ terms of service and how current and upcoming internet regulation applies to these CDNs.

This paper reviews online gender-based violence (OGBV) as existing within a continuum of (on- and offline) violence, emphasising the connections with different extremist ideologies, including the dissemination of terrorist and violent extremist content (TVEC). It aims to prioritise a gender perspective in responding to TVEC so that social media platforms can better intervene in and mitigate misogynistic pathways to radicalisation that can begin (or be reinforced) online. The discussion recognises that the mitigation of OGBV and online pathways to radicalisation requires a whole-of-society and whole-of-government approach. Whilst there are steps that governments and civil society can and should take, such as overseeing and enforcing emerging regulatory frameworks and voluntary commitments, this paper and its recommendations emphasise the role and actions of platforms.

This paper is based on an experiment-based study carried out in the first half of 2023, which aimed to understand how terrorist organizations can potentially exploit artificial intelligence. It discusses the risks of using AI to produce and disseminate propaganda, as well as verifies whether it can be used to facilitate access to terrorist content. It also explores if AI-based platforms can be used to access terrorism-related know-how. This paper also focuses on understanding the specificity of content moderation procedures introduced by these services to mitigate their use by violent extremists and provides recommendations for increasing their efficiency.