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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.

The October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel marked a pivotal moment not only in Middle East security policy but also in the global Islamist and particularly jihadi propaganda landscape. This article examines how the ensuing digital “victimhood-revenge” narrative rapidly spread across platforms like TikTok, fueling a new wave of radicalization among adolescents in Europe. Drawing on six European case studies from 2023 to 2025—including foiled and executed attacks in Vienna, Solingen, and Zurich—this article identifies a recurring radicalization pattern involving emotionally  vulnerable, digitally native individuals exposed to algorithm-driven Islamist content in social media, but predominantly on TikTok. The analysis conceptualizes this process through the lens of a “Virtual Caliphate Complex” and explores TikTok’s role as a low-threshold gateway into extremist ecosystems. By analyzing cross-platform mobilization dynamics, aesthetic framing, and the hybridization of lone-actor terrorism with online support networks, the article underscores the urgency of adapting P/CVE strategies to algorithmic environments. The conclusion suggests possible policy emphasis on content moderation, digital literacy, and platform accountability—particularly in the context of the European Union’s Digital Services Act legislation. The article contends that today’s prevailing Islamist radicalization pattern reflects not only ideological motivations but also youth-online-culture dynamics and algorithmic influence.

This work explores personalities of individuals at risk of Islamist radicalisation. Previous studies have successfully identified radicalised individuals on social media. However, a more prophylactic approach to counter radical communities would be to detect individuals prior to getting radicalised. A manually annotated dataset of 15,195 tweets from 259 persons believed to be at risk of radicalisation was classified according to Big 5 personality traits and compared to the same number of non-radical users. The results show that risk users can successfully be identified and exhibit distributional differences compared to non-radical users for Extraversion and Openness.

The journey inside Facebook’s semiosphere revolves around the present-day controversy on how algorithms foster polarization and discord in one of the biggest and most popular social media platforms, namely, Facebook. The present work focuses on the so-called Facebook Files as a specific case study. By drawing on these investigations, the present study discusses what are the principles used by the Facebook algorithms in order to select a certain type of content and to direct attention to it, whilst generally discarding other types of content considered not enough engaging. By drawing on the perspective of the semiotics of culture, this paper makes an analogy between Ju. Lotman’s model of the “semiosphere” and the Facebook’s digital semiosphere with the goal of unpacking how the selection, diffusion, and suppression of online content is geared towards the polarization of ideas.

This study explores the politics of naming in the Islamic state (IS) media networks, looking into how sympathisers’ (munāsir-s) virtual identities are socially constructed online. Naming is a discursive practice which is purely ideological in that when sympathisers name themselves online, they re-imagine their roles and the boundaries of their national belonging alongside cultural representations of the organisation. By naming, they reify IS cultural heritage which is recontextualised from the historical legacy of the Prophet and Islamic Conquest. By naming, they also amplify IS hegemonic cultural frames and master narratives. In this sense, naming oneself in the IS virtual ecosystem is a significant rhetorical strategy that may fulfil at least one of the three main cultural functions. Names may (1) imitate historical role models, (2) reconstruct the sense of belonging to homophilic communities (brothers of the same faith) beyond ethno-racial geographies, and/or (3) convey a politically religionist bias in constructing the self vs. the other. The politics of naming is an online social learning process in which collective intelligence instructs sympathisers on how to create accounts with innovative iconic/connotative identifying aliases. In IS social ecology, naming may stand for a ritual call to adventure, the destination of which is already recognised. Sympathisers are interpellated as jihadi subjects to cross the threshold of their ordinary world and embark on a virtual journey to media jihad – hence, their recognition of their new subject positions in support groups and the potential manufacturing of their loyalty and disavowal (al-walā’ wa l-barā’).

This study uses a quantitative natural-language processing tool, the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC), to evaluate the content of all Q drops over time, focusing on language themes associated with three core principles of psychological influence: cognitive, emotional, and social processes. Before detailing this study, we situate it within the broader contexts of national security and the social psychology of influence literature.