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Drawing from interviews with 39 online extremism and terrorism researchers, this article provides an empirical analysis of these researchers’ experiences with institutional ethics processes. Discussed are the harms that these researchers face in the course of their work, including trolling, doxing, and mental and emotional trauma arising from exposure to terrorist content, which highlight the need for an emphasis on researcher welfare. We find that researcher welfare is a neglected aspect of ethics review processes however, with most interviewees not required to gain ethics approval for their research resulting in very little attention to researcher welfare issues. Interviewees were frustrated with ethics processes, indicating that committees oftentimes lacked the requisite knowledge to make informed ethical decisions. Highlighted by interviewees too was a concern that greater emphasis on researcher welfare could result in blockages to their ‘risky’ research, creating a ‘Catch 22’: interviewees would like more emphasis on their (and colleagues’) welfare and provision of concomitant supports, but feel that increased oversight would make gaining ethics approval for their research more difficult, or even impossible. We offer suggestions for breaking the impasse, including more interactions between ethics committees and researchers; development of tailored guidelines; and more case studies reflecting on ethics processes.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict started on 7 October 2023, have resulted thus far to over 48,000 people killed including more than 17,000 children with a majority from Gaza, more than 30,000 people injured, over 10,000 missing, and over 1 million people displaced, fleeing conflict zones. The infrastructure damage includes the 87\% of housing units, 80\% of public buildings and 60\% of cropland 17 out of 36 hospitals, 68\% of road networks and 87\% of school buildings damaged. This conflict has as well launched an online discussion across various social media platforms. Telegram was no exception due to its encrypted communication and highly involved audience. The current study will cover an analysis of the related discussion in relation to different participants of the conflict and sentiment represented in those discussion. To this end, we prepared a dataset of 125K messages shared on channels in Telegram spanning from 23 October 2025 until today. Additionally, we apply the same analysis in two publicly available datasets from Twitter containing 2001 tweets and from Reddit containing 2M opinions. We apply a volume analysis across the three datasets, entity extraction and then proceed to BERT topic analysis in order to extract common themes or topics. Next, we apply sentiment analysis to analyze the emotional tone of the discussions. Our findings hint at polarized narratives as the hallmark of how political factions and outsiders mold public opinion. We also analyze the sentiment-topic prevalence relationship, detailing the trends that may show manipulation and attempts of propaganda by the involved parties. This will give a better understanding of the online discourse on the Israel-Palestine conflict and contribute to the knowledge on the dynamics of social media communication during geopolitical crises.

The PMC Wagner emerged as a central actor in the Russian power projection. This research consists of an evidence-based analysis to grasp the relationships within the pro-Wagner digital ecosystem. Through Socio-Semantic Network Analysis and hate-speech detection using a machine learning model, the study aims to map the PMC Wagner on Telegram and reconstruct its morphological characteristics. The study demonstrates that some intermediaries are essential in spreading propaganda due to a combination of their position and the violence of their discourse. Targeting the videos of the most relevant intermediaries is an efficient strategy to prevent other violent extremist actors.

Increasing attention paid to the far right commonly glosses over transnational activity, which reflects an imperial strategy to globalize far-right thinking and its attendant discursive and physical violence against others. Empirically, I focus on far-right transnational linkages among ordinary people (not state officials) between the United States and Europe and across Europe, and between India and the Indian diaspora especially in the United States to present variation in organizational strategies. Transnational far-right activity’s under-the-radar status is due to dated assumptions that presume transnational linkages occur on a top, down basis, and emanate from the formal political sphere, overlooking significant transnational material and immaterial linkages forged online by ordinary people who carry messaging through the far-right online ecosystem to affect political decision-making and societal discourses more generally. In the case of the far-right Indian diaspora, public-facing self-presentation aligns with Hinduism, which embraces peace and coexistence, despite the pursuit of the opposite, and this multicultural guise complements the bottom, up flow of far-right messaging to render Hindu nationalism, Hindutva, difficult to see. The far right throughout the world unites around casteism, the embrace of a fixed and “natural” societal hierarchy, and is fueled emotionally by the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. Both casteism and replacement theory are adaptable to different contexts to enable unity across contexts despite internal diversity among far-right groups, notably in the United States, and diverse targets of hatred. Far-right unity-in-diversity obviates constraints on transnational activity based on nativism and enables different in organization and psychosocial and cultural practices.

This study addresses the crime of promoting terrorist acts through digital platforms, its dangers, and the legislative gaps in this context within the Jordanian Cybercrime Law No. 17 of 2023, comparing it with the corresponding legislative provisions in UAE. The problem at the core of this study lies in the insufficiency of the Jordanian Cybercrime Law to effectively address the crime of promoting terrorist acts through digital platforms, social media, new media, and smart applications, with a clear oversight despite its importance and necessity. The study concludes with several results and recommendations, which will be summarised here. Firstly, technical infrastructure issues: The technical infrastructure continues to face significant issues that allow terrorists to infiltrate, along with insufficient international cooperation between Jordan and other countries to address advanced electronic threats and ensure effective digital security. The study concludes with several recommendations, the most prominent being the need to add a specific provision to the Jordanian Cybercrime Law No. 17 of 2023 to penalise this crime.

The rise of the far right has captured the attention of scholars across media studies, political science, and sociology. Digital technology played an important role in the rise of the far right and has deeply shaped this global movement. Focusing on research in Western societies (primarily Europe and North America), this review takes stock of how scholars in these three disciplines have studied the intersection of the far right and digital technology. The review introduces the problem of fuzzy collectivity to understand how scholars have made sense of the far right as an assemblage of increasingly complex networks of actors distributed across websites, alternative media, and platforms. Exploring solutions to the problem of fuzzy collectivity in the literature, the review proposes that far‐right engagement with digital technology should be conceptualized as a racial project engaging in metapolitics, a term used by far‐right ideologues that understands cultural movements to be prefigurative of political change. The review then explores the intersection of the far right and digital technology today, examining how it uses technology and the context of this use. The review then identifies pathways to reintegrate critical perspectives on racism in future research on the far right and digital technology.