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Social media and terrorist financing (SMTF) refers to how terror organisations (TO), sometimes called violent extremist organisations (VEOs), have exploited free social media platforms to raise money for terrorism/fighting/jihad, to recruit, train, equip, and transport fighters, to support extremist religious proto-states (e.g., Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS]), to market/brand an organisation including to disseminate its ideologies, and/or to amass wealth. This chapter considers the scope of SMTF and legal/policy responses to its ever-evolving practices, discusses how it is practised and by whom, and considers the challenges of fighting SMTF. SMTF is part of the larger concept of cyberterrorism where terrorists target computer systems maliciously and use digital technology to facilitate terror attacks, though some argue that these two actions are completely different phenomena. The chapter concludes by summarising the key points of the discussion, offering suggestions for future study of this phenomenon, and reflecting on the societal impacts of SMTF.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

Societal crises, such as COVID-19, produce societal instability and create a fertile ground for radicalization. Extremists exploit such crises by distributing disinformation to amplify uncertainty and distrust. Based on these developments, this study presents a longitudinal analysis across three different non-violent extremist ideologies in the UK (Islamist, far right and eco-radicals). As part of the study, public social media channels Twitter/X, Facebook, and Telegram) of Britain First, 5 Pillars, and Earth First! were analyzed using a computational language classifier of over 36,000 posts between 2016 and 2021. The increasing prevalence of conspiracy narratives, as well as violent, hateful, and threatening language among the corpus indicates that radicalization dynamics were present and heightened, pre-, during, and post-Pandemic.

Since the inception of video games, extremist groups have been able create, modify, and weaponise this media for activism and their campaigns. More recently, however, the emergence of gaming-adjacent platforms (most notably Discord, Twitch and Steam) has become a key organisational tool for recruitment and community-building; something that policing communities all over the world have been grappling with, especially in regard to the potential for extremist content to create radicalising effects that lead to political violence. This article explores how policing communities are approaching extremist groups on gaming-adjacent platforms, what strategies they’ve been using, and the effect this has on extremist activism -both in the online, but also more crucially in the offline, space. Using semi-structured interviews with 13 leading P/CVE practitioners, academic and technology industry experts, and content moderation teams, what the article finds is that third-party policing communities are increasingly using more sophisticated tactics to combat extremist content but that these efforts are being increasingly frustrated by the networked nature of extremism and a lack of robust enforcement at platform level. In the future, this research suggests that more transparency about terms of service enforcement from above and mitigation of toxic extremist ‘adjacent’ cultures from below might help foster more resilience against the prevalence of extremism on gaming-adjacent platforms.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.