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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.

This study examines how racially and ethnically motivated extremists use online platforms for recruitment and mobilization through a thematic analysis of messaging about the nature and meaning of offline engagement in extremism found on Telegram. The analysis draws on text and image data from posts shared by administrators of Telegram channels associated with the white nationalist Active Club network. It shows that channel administrators portray offline engagement in Active Clubs as a shift away from modern culture; an introduction to a supportive community; a journey of self-improvement; an opportunity to create change; and a difficult path involving risk and challenge.

The gaming ecosystem is increasingly observed with the concern that it could pose a threat to public safety, and research accumulates evidence for blatant extremism in the surrounding online space of games. Currently, a connection between gaming and extremism can be established through identity related processes, e.g., gaming-related radicalization elements, distal to gaming itself, such as gaming communities and culture. However, this also raises the question of what the precise function of proximal gaming factors, such as gameplay, mechanics, stories, or game-play motivations, is in the relationship between gaming and extremism. This article aims to shed light on the relation of gaming and extremism by identifying individual profiles of videogame playing based on gameplay motivations and linking them to indications of radical attitudes (here: xenophobia and violence acceptance) as well as conspiracy beliefs that can be associated with extremist beliefs. Further, we include marginalization and anomie as mediators to gain comparative and fine-grained information about the sole impact of gaming motives on radical attitudes. Our findings indicate that while few motivational profiles exhibit weak yet direct connections to radical attitudes, others display the opposite pattern, suggesting a more complex relationship. Marginalization and anomie strongly predict most radical outcome variables and mediate the relationship in most cases, however sometimes negatively. We only found one complex motivational profile that substantially leans toward late-stage radical attitudes, while for instance, dominant social motives clearly inhibit radical outcomes. The current study thus deflates any straightforward perspective on the becoming of a ‘radical gamer’.

Patriotic Alternative (PA) is one of Britain’s largest fascist organizations. PA members have served prison sentences for terrorism and hate crime offenses and MPs have called for the organization to be proscribed under counter-terrorism legislation. This article employs a cultural and narrative criminological approach to analyze PA activists’ accounts of their political journeys into the far right. PA activists’ stories are simultaneously personal accounts of conversion and narratives of impending racial apocalypse. The study offers insights into how the internet and social media now facilitate pathways into the far right, and the emotional dimensions of contemporary far-right narratives and beliefs.