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VOX-Pol Blog post.

Does the URL referral structure of websites lead users into ‘rabbit holes’ of unreliable content? Past work suggests algorithmic recommender systems on sites like YouTube lead users to view more unreliable content. However, websites without algorithmic recommender systems have financial and political motivations to influence the movement of users, potentially creating browsing rabbit holes. We address this gap using browser telemetry that captures referrals to a large sample of domains rated as reliable or unreliable information sources. Our results suggest the incentives for unreliable sites to retain and monetise users create rabbit holes. After landing on an unreliable site, users are very likely to be referred to another page on the site. Further, unreliable sites are better at retaining users than reliable sites. We find less support for political motivations. While reliable and unreliable sites are largely disconnected from one another, the probability of traveling from one unreliable site to another is relatively low. Our findings indicate the need for additional focus on site-level incentives to shape traffic moving through their sites.

The terrorist attacks in Norway in 2011 and New Zealand in 2019 have revealed that the far-right worldwide uses the memory of the Yugoslav wars for online mobilization. Scholars working on memory activism usually deal with the liberal, self-critical memory emerging from the bottom-up activism of human rights groups while neglecting the activism of the far-right. This article fills the gap by addressing the global circulation of two memes, Remove Kebab and Pepe the Frog, as examples of far-right memory activism. In order to address the transnational circulation of memes as memory activism, this article employs the concept of ‘traveling memory’ while relying on multimodal discourse analysis to unveil the processes of memetic transformation, imitation, iconization and narrativization. The analysis reveals an alternative memory of Yugoslav wars that depicts Serbia as the first case of ‘white genocide’ in Europe, reversing the roles of war criminals and victims while propagating violence and celebrating genocide. The article argues that memory studies can no longer ignore memory production of far-right communities and, at the same time, outlines the method for examining far-right digital memory activism, revealing a whole set of mnemonic practices developed among the anonymous fringe communities of the far-right.

Incels (“involuntary celibates”) are online communities of young men, broadly aligned by anti-feminism, concern over an inability to form sexual relationships with women, and a strong negative focus on their own appearance. Incels have been linked to violent misogyny and several mass killings. Using critical discourse analysis on data from nine different incel online forums, this article explores how incels discussed the Plymouth shooting in August 2021, often reported as an incel attack, looking at the discourses which are invoked to justify or delegitimize violence. As well as violent rhetoric, our research also pays attention to anti-violent rhetoric in incel communities, an area not yet discussed in the literature regarding incels, but which may be invaluable to those hoping to address the issue of incel violence. Our findings identify significant differences in the way the shooting is discussed across different incel forums, and reveal that both pro and anti-violence discourses frequently invoke lookism and mental health to justify victimhood.

In the aftermath of 9/11 security agencies augmented their counterterrorism (CT) apparatuses with advanced analytics, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve their ability to identify and neutralize terrorists. Under this regime, humans remained the central actors, tasked with understanding information and crafting a response. The advent of Generative AI (GenAI) changes this equation. GenAI’s ability to mimic humanity’s reasoning skills augurs a world where machines assume responsibility for most CT activities. This possibility raises fears of machines outside of human control. These fears are currently unfounded, and to the extent that they’re real, they must be weighed against the ability to reduce the victims of terrorism. As this world forms, what will matter more is decision-makers’ understanding of AI/ML outputs for counterterrorism, as they will have to make strategic choices around a series of ethical and policy choices that are inherently human. This article explores this subject more in-depth, reviewing the evolution of AI/ML and its impact on different CT domains, exploring the strategic dimensions of AI/ML, and concluding with a series of policy recommendations.

The article analyzes the online humorous practices and discursive conventions of a far-right Russian Telegram community during a sociopolitical crisis. A sample of 130 disparagement jokes is examined to find out how existential uncertainty, created by the outbreak of a full-scale war, affects the far-right humorous othering. The jokes were published in a Local Crew channel a month before and a month after two moments of the most acute sociopolitical upheaval, namely, the declaration of mobilization and the attempted coup by the Wagner Group. The findings demonstrate that, after the war started, the community opted for demonizing the single outgroup while attempting to preserve the coherent ingroup by means of building ingroup appreciation within a pro-military nationalist niche. Additional upheavals were framed as irrelevant, compared to the major identity markers and the general crisis of the war, and did not affect either the community’s rhetoric or the othering patterns.