Online Library

Algorithms and especially recommendation algorithms play an important role online, most notably on YouTube. Yet, little is known about the network communities that these algorithms form. We analyzed the channel recommendations on YouTube to map the communities that the social network is creating through its algorithms and to test the network for homophily, that is, the connectedness between communities. We find that YouTube’s channel recommendation algorithm fosters the creation of highly homophilous communities in the United States (n = 13,529 channels) and in Germany (n = 8,000 channels). Factors that seem to drive YouTube’s recommendations are topics, language, and location. We highlight the issue of homophilous communities in the context of politics where YouTube’s algorithms create far-right communities in both countries.

This chapter explores the intersection of white and male supremacy, both of which misrepresent women as genetically and intellectually inferior and reduce them to reproductive and/or sexual functions. The white power movement historically has been characterized by sexism and misogyny, as evidenced by the movement’s attempts to retain European heritage and maintain whiteness by policing the behavior and controlling the bodies of white women. However, the influence of white supremacist discourses on physically violent manifestations of the male supremacist movement remains largely understudied. Using supervised machine learning, we compare a corpus of violent male supremacist manifestos and other multimodal content with highly influential white nationalist texts and the manifestos of violent white supremacists to identify the shared beliefs, tropes and justifications for violence deployed within.

The study examines three anonymous sharing portals employed strategically by the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) to achieve its political ends. This study argues that anonymous sharing portals such as Sendvid.com, Justpast.it, and Dump.to have been instrumental in allowing individual jihadists to generate content, disseminate propaganda and communicate freely while routing around filtering practiced by popular social media networks.The study draws on Actor Network Theory (ANT) in examining the relationship between ISIS jihadists and the emergence of anonymous sharing portals. The study suggests that, even though used prior to the massive degrading operation across social media, anonymous sharing portals were instrumental in allowing ISIS to maintain its networking structure in the face of coordinated disruption.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

In this report a team of scholars critically assesses both the “cyberutopian” and “cyberskeptic” perspectives on the impact of new media on political movements. The authors propose a more complex approach that looks at the role of new media in contentious politics from five interlocking levels of analysis: individual transformation, intergroup relations, collective action, regime policies, and external attention.

This chapter analyses the Norwegian authorities’ presence on Twitter during the 22 July 2011 terrorist attacks. Twitter activity by two official institutions is analysed in particular, namely, the blood bank at Oslo University Hospital and the Norwegian Police Security Services (PST). Our findings show that the Norwegian authorities were almost completely absent on Twitter during the critical hours of the terrorist attack, and that there was no coordination and synchronisation of communication from the authorities. This official silence allowed the diffusion of speculation and misinformation to take place; these were neither corrected nor addressed, as the analysed PST case shows. In contrast, the blood bank used Twitter to mobilise blood donors to address an acute problem: a shortage of blood to treat casualties. The chapter concludes by offering recommendations to the authorities for future major incidents. Book edited by Harald Hornmoen and Klas Backholm.