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People use social media platforms to chat, search, and share information, express their opinions, and connect with others. But these platforms also facilitate the posting of divisive, harmful, and hateful messages, targeting groups and individuals, based on their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or political views.Hate content is not only a problem on the Internet, but also on traditional media,especially in places where the Internet is not widely available or in rural areas.Despite growing awareness of the harms that exposure to hate can cause, especially to victims, there is no clear consensus in the literature on what specific impacts this exposure, as bystanders, produces on individuals, groups, and the population at large. Most of the existing research has focused on analyzing the content and the extent of the problem. More research in this area is needed to develop better intervention programs that are adapted to the current reality of hate. The objective of this review is to synthesize the empirical evidence on how media exposure to hate affects or is associated with various outcomes for individuals and groups.

This thesis examines how extremist far-right recruiters communicate online to support Australia’s countering violent extremism (CVE) early detection efforts. It argues that current strategies—while sometimes effective—overlook online spaces as primary recruitment sites, focus too heavily on detecting already-radicalised individuals, and rely on oversimplified root-cause models. Further, it contends that detection is hindered by representational biases portraying the far right as non-terrorist and unified, leaving many groups free to operate. Using an interdisciplinary approach combining media logic with Critical Terrorism and Security Studies, the research develops an original “Extremism Typology,” blending Social Identity Theory and Identity Theory to analyse how social, cultural, and collective identities shape recruitment discourse. Applying multimodal discourse analysis to far-right websites, it conceptualises recruiters as “lighthouses” guiding audiences through a “digital fog” of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. It concludes that far-right groups are not unified and that effective early detection must treat them as distinct entities while recognising online environments as central to recruitment.

Terrorist organizations have consistently demonstrated their ability to evolve alongside society’s ever-advancing technological landscape. Rather than relying on dependable tactics tested over several decades, terrorist organizations’ willingness to innovate has led to expanded capabilities to inflict harm upon society. The most significant technological advancement of the twenty first century is artificial intelligence (AI). Although AI will be a catalyst for societal transformation, nefarious actors will undoubtedly attempt to leverage the technology’s vast capabilities for malicious purposes, especially terrorist organizations. However, while prior research has systematically reviewed the literature to establish the state-of-the-art in AI-assisted counterterrorism, there is a noticeable knowledge gap surrounding terrorists’ use of AI in their operations. The present study employs a systematic literature review methodology to comprehensively compile and review existing scientific knowledge on the convergence of AI and terrorism. A thorough primary search across five databases and a secondary search in Google Scholar yielded twenty-eight sources meeting our inclusion criteria. The review reveals several areas where AI will likely augment current terrorist activities, including propaganda and recruitment, offensive cyber operations, attack tactics and strategies, and various day-to-day undertakings. This systematic literature review elucidates these areas of technological advancement, provides implications for policy and practice, and offers directions for future research in this critical field.

In 2022, an anti-vaccine mandate protest in Canada received millions of dollars in support through online crowdfunding. This event catalyzed political crowdfunding in Canada by demonstrating its ability to disseminate ideological discourse and mobilize collective action. Given its newfound visibility and impact, this study examines the landscape of political crowdfunding in Canada. We examined 60 campaigns from the legal, current events and political categories on the crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo and classified campaigns into: COVID-19-related topics, alternative media and free speech, climate change skepticism, and other political campaigns. Thematic analysis of the interactive discourse between campaign hosts and donors revealed that many campaigns were motivated by defending individual rights and freedoms amidst perceived government overreach, which fuels a distrust towards authority, including the government and mainstream media. Our study suggests that political crowdfunding empowers individuals to symbolically reflect their political and ideological beliefs through financial donations.

This study explores the synergies between two complementary interventions for countering online extremism: deplatforming, a “hard” intervention that involves removing extremist users from online platforms, and inoculation, a “soft” intervention that exposes users to weakened forms of extremist arguments to build resistance. We developed an agent-based model to simulate the diffusion and control of online extremism, using data from systematic reviews and empirical studies. The model focuses on a population of Bayesian agents within an anti-immigration Facebook group, where these agents form beliefs about far-right content spread by extremists. We introduce both deplatforming and inoculation as interventions in the model to control the spread of extremism and find strong evidence that inoculation has a synergistic effect on deplatforming. This synergy stems from inoculation’s ability to stabilise opinion dynamics at the group level, leading to more effective containment of extremist beliefs. The findings suggest that a combined approach involving both deplatforming and inoculation is more effective than implementing either intervention in isolation. We deploy a cost–benefit analysis to show that the existence of synergies at a structural level enables the identification of efficient resource allocation. Our article demonstrates the potential of applying agent-based modelling to the study of counter-extremism policies.

Far-right extremism is rapidly becoming a primary security threat in both the UK and Australia. By adopting a comparative case-study approach, this article examines how misogyny and gendered narratives espoused through online channels can serve as motivators towards violent extremism through transnational networks. We argue that gendered narratives specifically play a key role in influencing motivations for joining and participating in extremist groups and can frame the parameters of involvement for both women and men. We further found that misogyny is a shared expression amongst different actors in the far-right spectrum despite distinct local contexts, and in the case of the UK and Australia these narratives served as a shared vocabulary that facilitated the communication of these ideas transnationally. This influences our current understanding of the nexus between misogyny and violent extremism, in that misogyny creates a linking identity factor and a common line of communication across different geopolitical environments, facilitating both narrative connections and common understanding. Our findings have implications for P/CVE stakeholders and practitioners in risk assessment and management in that it will improve understanding of how misogyny and gender narratives serve as motivators towards violent extremism across three key layers, and the type of discourse used to sustain and legitimise involvement.