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The twenty-first century’s development of the Internet has led to a significant shift in contemporary communication (Zelin in The state of global jihad online: a qualitative, guantitative, and cross-lingual analysis. New America Foundation, 2013). While the Internet is widely utilised in everyday life to distribute and share information, it has also created an environment in which virtual societies have become a breeding ground for new risks and threats (Hawdon et al. in NORDICOM 3:29–37, 2015). Consequently, terrorist and extremist organisations exploit the accessibility of the Internet to facilitate their violent activities and spread their extremist ideology (Montasari et al. in Privacy, Security and Forensics in the Internet of Things (IoT). Springer International Publishing AG, 2022). This chapter aims to analyse the impact of the Internet on the rise of extremism and terrorism. To this end, the chapter will first investigate the role of the Internet in promoting the online radicalisation process, which leads to participation in terrorist acts. It will then critically examine how the Internet alters the nature of violent extremism, including its fatal consequences in the real world. Finally, the chapter will explore how and for what purposes violent extremists use the Internet, focusing on recruitment through propaganda, training and planning by sharing information, psychological warfare and fundraising.

The approach from the far-right in producing and disseminating visual propaganda has allowed for a persistent online presence to be maintained, despite efforts to remove extremist and hateful content. This chapter will critically explore the academic literature which considers how far-right actors are taking advantages of the affordances of online communication routes to spread visual propaganda. Three key strategies which emerge from the literature will be critically discussed to understand the role of visual imagery in facilitating and maintaining far-right online discourse. Firstly, the use of imagery to other out-groups through boundary construction will be considered. From understanding how such representations drive online engagement, the second strategy of image and information manipulation will be discussed. This strategy will consider how the far-right take advantage of social media systems to garner more visibility through manipulating and framing imagery. Lastly, considerations will be made towards how humour through meme images and board subculture have been used as a strategy to lower the boundary for the participation in extremist ideology.

ISIS has seemingly been successful in mobilizing advocates from heterogenous backgrounds. Such diversity is symptomatic of the organization’s heavy investment in strategic messaging and identity construction to gain legitimacy. This study examined the multimodal discursive properties of ISIS’s narrative in its communique, Dabiq. It undertook a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of the representation of in-group and out-group actors implementing Van Leeuwen’s socio-semantic inventory. The results showed that the in-group members are deliberately specified, hence foregrounded, and at the same time, the diversity among them is highlighted as an inseparable hallmark of ISIS’s movement. Therefore, no racial, geographical, or cultural line was drawn apropos its participants to ensure more inclusion. Conversely, the perceived enemies are framed as diverse yet homogeneous entities textually through generic references and addressing them collectively regardless of their potential dissimilarities and visually by categorizing them through religiously, culturally, or nationally distinguishable features. It acts as a legitimation tactic by which striking against one enemy justifies striking against others. The combination of these strategic multimodal framing tasks serves as a propaganda tool for ISIS to intensify polarisation, enhance in-group participation, and ultimately facilitate mobilization.

The development of social media technologies has had a significant impact on individuals, organizations and societies. However, social media has not only affected people and communities, but also terrorist organizations have started to use social media platforms effectively. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria ( ISIS ) is one such group that actively utilizes social media. Social media has played a critical role in formulating and disseminating ISIS ’s strategies. Twitter is one of the most effective social media platforms used by ISIS , and it actively uses Twitter in predominantly Muslim countries such as Turkey. In this article, I use a dictionary-based method to compare and analyze 29,419 tweets from English-speaking supporters of ISIS and 40,526 tweets from Turkish supporters of ISIS between 2015 and 2016.

This study explores the main building blocks of participatory activism utilised by sympathisers of the Islamic State within their online media networks. The organisation has named this militant practice “media jihad” or militancy (munasara), which is built on the cultural patterns of traditional ground-based jihad. The practice involves transferring cultural values and war manoeuvres into the virtual ecosystem. The virtual tactics used by sympathisers are linked to the cultural norms of jihad, resulting in a combination of battlefield jihad values and digital resistance practices. The term “Jihacktivism” is introduced to describe this complex combinative Jihadist contention model promoted by the Islamic State. It is a digital resistance paradigm that decentralises the production and dissemination of the Islamic State’s propaganda and empowers sympathisers to contribute to the organisation’s communication of jihad. By doing so, sympathisers may foster a sense of solidarity and become more identified with the group’s cultural schemas and ideological beliefs.

Online extremist movements are increasingly using social media communities to share content, spread their ideologies, recruit members, and mobilize offline activities. In recent years, mainstream platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, have adopted policies to remove or deplatform some of these movements. Yet online extremists are well-known for their abilities to adapt, self-censor, and migrate across online platforms. How successful have these extremist movement deplatformings been? To answer this question, we begin by training a classifier to identify content generated by four prominent extremist movements: white supremacists, patriot/militia groups, QAnon, and Boogaloos. After doing so, we use this classifier to analyze approximately 12 million posts generated by about 1500 online hate communities across 8 social media platforms, including both mainstream and alternative platforms. We find that the deplatformings of Boogaloos and QAnon by mainstream platforms were initially highly successful, but that both movements were able to find ways to re-introduce their content on these platforms. These findings highlight the challenges of movement-based deplatforming, and they point toward important implications for content moderation.