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This article examines how the United Patriots Front (UPF), an Australian far-right organization, has communicated its ideology with reference to right-wing politics in Australia, Western Europe, and the United States, and through allusions to Islamic State. The investigation uses critical discourse and documentary analysis and a framework derived from the theory of Pierre Bourdieu to analyze textual and audiovisual postings on UPF Facebook pages, YouTube channels, and Twitter accounts. Relevant to the discussion are Bourdieu’s interdependent theories on “doxa” as a condition in which socially constructed phenomena appear self-evident, and “habitus” and “field,” which explain how structures and agents, through their reflexive behavior, become dialectically situated.

The emergence and growth of incel subculture online has triggered a considerable body of research to date, most of which analyzing its worldview or mapping its position and connections within the broader manosphere. While this research has considerably enhanced our understanding of the incel phenomenon, it tends to offer a somewhat static, one-dimensional portrayal of what is—like all online subcultures and communities—a highly dynamic and multi-layered environment. Consequently, we lack sufficiently nuanced answers to what is arguably a critical question for law enforcement and academics alike: is this a violent extremist ideology? Using a uniquely extensive corpus covering a range of online spaces constitutive of the incelosphere spanning several years, we analyze the evolution of incel language across both time and platforms. Specifically, we test whether this language has grown more extreme over time as online spaces shutdown and others emerged. Our findings demonstrate that, while levels of violent extremist language do vary across the incelosphere, they have steadily increased in the main online spaces over the past 6 years. Further, we demonstrate that, while activity on these online spaces is responsive to offline events, the impact of these on violent extremist ideation is not uniform.

The counter-jihad scene can be understood variously as a collection of parties, pundits, and movements all linked by a common belief that the West is being subjected to takeover by Muslims. In this article, I seek to improve academic understanding of this collection of movements, parties, and ideas by analyzing the discourse presented by a collection of online advocates whom I describe as the counter-jihad nebula. The findings suggest a need to at least partially re-evaluate the role of the nebula within the wider counter-jihad scene as well as the relationship between the wider counter-jihad scene and mainstream political discourse as expressed through various media outlets.

The incel (involuntary celibate) community is an extremist online community that practices intense misogyny, racism, and that glorifies – and sometimes practices – violence. Work to understand the dynamics within incel communities has been hindered by the fact that these communities are spread over many platforms and many of the more popular forums of the past have been banned and their content deleted. In this paper, we present two main contributions. First, we introduce a carefully reconstructed, nearly complete archive of incel forums dating back to 2016, including millions of posts that can no longer be accessed. Then we illustrate a technique for identifying community-specific language and using that as a marker of extremism to track radicalization over time.

Social media’s role in the spread and evolution of extremism is a focus of intense study. Online extremists have been involved in the spread of online hate, mis/disinformation, and real-world violence. However, the overwhelming majority of existing work has focused on right-wing extremism. In this paper, we perform a first of its kind large-scale, data-driven study exploring left-wing extremism. We focus on “tankies,” a left-wing community that first arose in the 1950s in support of hardline actions of the USSR and has evolved to support what they call “actually existing socialist countries,” e.g., CCP run China, the USSR, former soviet countries, and North Korea. We collect 1.3M posts from 53K authors from tankies subreddits, and explore the position of tankies within the broader far-left community on Reddit. Among other things, we find that tankies are clearly on the periphery of the larger far-left community. When examining the contents of posts, we find misalignments and conceptual homomorphisms that confirm the description of tankies in the theoretical work. We also discover that tankies focus more on state-level political events rather than social issues in comparison to other far-left communities. Finally, we show that tankies exhibit some of the same worrying behaviors as right-wing extremists, e.g., relatively high toxicity and an organized response to deplatforming events.