Online Library

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.

This paper maps communication channels exploited by the Salafi-jihadist violent extremist organisations (VEOs) and their followers between March 2020 and June 2022 on The Onion Router (TOR). It argues that the true scale of digital jihadist presence on TOR has remained insignificant for years. Militant Islamists have mostly used .onion domains as backup propaganda dissemination channels, which enable content takedown policies introduced by countering violent extremism stakeholders to be circumvented. Aside from propaganda distribution, TOR attracts Salafi-jihadist VEOs and their followers for other reasons, as it facilitates anonymous communication, crowdfunding, sharing of terrorist manuals or the organisation of terrorist attacks.

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.