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Misinformation, as a tool that accelerates pathways of radicalization, requires an urgent response from both scholars and practitioners in education. In this chapter, we first examine a model of radicalization—the Educational Displacement and Replacement Model—to spotlight the distinct role that misinformation plays in enabling educationally displaced youth to embrace narratives of hate. By offering contemporary examples of misinforming narratives coupled with an illustration of the “scaling up” of a student’s personal grievances to associated (collective) grievances, we argue that misinformation serves as a form of building relationality among prospective “recruits” who face Educational Displacement. With this perspective of the connective role played by misinformation in linking the youth to movements fueled by narratives of hate, we conclude with evidence-based forms of pedagogic approaches, one of which is co-designed by the authors, to prevent radicalization via misinformation.

The advent of the World Wide Web created new digital worlds consisting of networked blogs, websites, chatrooms and forums for every topic under the sun (or in the shadows). An unintended side effect of such digital communities is that they have enabled individuals with extreme beliefs to find others to validate their grievances and encourage them to action. One of the largest and most notable of these communities is known as the ‘Manosphere’, an anti-women digital world that foments extreme misogyny, dehumanising women and, at its deepest levels, advocating for violence against all things feminist. This chapter will lay out the contours of the Manosphere and illuminate the major threats arising from this online space.

This paper reviews available research on how the internet facilitates radicalisation and measures to prevent it. It briefly canvasses evidence on the extent to which the internet contributes to radicalisation broadly, and who is most susceptible to its influence, before delving further into the mechanisms underpinning the relationship between the internet and violent extremism.

High-level approaches to combating internet-facilitated radicalisation, including content removal, account suspensions, reducing anonymity, and counternarrative and education campaigns, are mapped against these mechanisms. This illustrates how these approaches can disrupt radicalisation and assists researchers, policymakers and practitioners to identify potential gaps in existing counterterrorism and countering violent extremism regimes. Research on the implementation and outcomes of these approaches is also summarised.

Following the January 6 insurrection on the US Capitol, we sought to explore how two social media platforms were being used concurrently to disseminate far-right memes and discourse. Our study employs a mixed-methods approach to collect a large data set of images from 4chan/pol/ and using the “#stopthesteal” hashtag on Twitter between 1 January 2021 and 13 January 2021. Our findings reveal how each platform influenced the usage of memes toward identity building and far-right activism in the days leading up to and immediately after the insurrection. Our findings reveal that Twitter was used to mobilize users leading up to January 6 but led to in-fighting among the pro-Trump crowd in the days after. Meanwhile 4chan/pol users took advantage of the Overton window of the Insurrection to disseminate far-right ideology and attempt to recruit and radicalize disgruntled Trump supporters after the insurrection was deemed a failure.

Previous research has highlighted the prominent behavior of lone wolf terrorists to produce and share a manifesto publicly, outlining their frustrations and motivations for their eventual terrorist attack. This article aims to explore this phenomenon, focusing on the timelapse between when a terrorist manifesto is posted online and when the eventual attack occurs, discussing the time difference between the two events for 12 cases of lone wolf terrorism. The results revealed that the average time lapse between when a manifesto was posted online and when the terrorist attack occurs is one hour, 43 min. Limitations and implications are discussed in detail.

Social media platforms, such as Instagram, are regularly misused for spreading covert (Islamic) extremist propaganda. Affect and emotion are central tools used in extremist propaganda, but there is little research into the combined employment of different social media elements, such as hashtags, visuals, and texts, in the context of propaganda. This study contributes to closing this gap. Using the German group Generation Islam as a case study, we examined the group’s Instagram activity (N = 1,187 posts) over the course of 2 years. To reflect the platform users’ logic, we (a) examined affect in hashtag networks in which users can come across propagandistic content, (b) employed deep learning to examine the emotional valence transmitted in the visuals, and (c) used automated linguistic analysis to describe collective action cues contained within the texts. The results are novel, as they provide nuanced insights into extremist propaganda’s employment of affect and emotions across Instagram’s affordances.