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The certification of the 2020 election drew a substantial crowd of far-right extremists, with 13% of individuals arrested for crimes committed at the Capitol on January 6th having ties to militia groups. Even before the 2020 election, a 2019 report highlighted the increasing popularity of QAnon conspiracy theories among militia members, a trend which only grew more prevalent as the COVID-19 pandemic brought together a collection of extremist actors. During and following the 2020 election, militia members incorporated QAnon election fraud conspiracies as a central belief, and these conspiracies served as the main mobilizing factor driving militia members to the Capitol on January 6th. This paper explores why QAnon 2020 election conspiracies appealed so strongly to QAnon-adhering militia members. It further examines connections between QAnon 2020 election conspiracies and existing ideological foundations within militias, as well as how the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated and cemented these convergences.

Before, during, and after the 2020 election, online QAnon communities latched onto conspiracies of a “deep state” interfering in the 2020 election to steal Donald Trump’s election win. In this study of QAnon and the militia-sphere, QAnon 2020 election fraud conspiracies are defined as conspiracies emerging from QAnon communities claiming a group of actors within the government interfered in the election. These conspiracies include the beliefs that “middle-of-the-night dumps of fake mail-in ballots [swung] red states to blue” and “Republican votes had been changed or thrown out thanks to foreign plots, complex CIA vote-harvesting programs, and the machinations of a truly evil election administrator–the voting-machine company Dominion.” QAnon’s 2020 election fraud conspiracies took root within far-right communities fiercely loyal to Donald Trump, but other underlying factors within QAnon also appealed more broadly to militias.

The project used the grounded theory-inspired software, “Delve,” to insert transcripts from official court documents from the Department of Justice, video clips published by news outlets, news articles, publicly available social media posts, and public interviews with QAnon-adhering militia members arrested for crimes on January 6th. These quotes were then coded within the transcripts based on their reflection of militia ideology, QAnon language and conspiracies, the 2020 election, and other ideas more broadly found within the far-right. This paper explores three prevailing categories within the data: government corruption, apocalypticism, and defense. Analysis of these categories suggests that QAnon appeals to QAnon-adhering militia members because it aligns with existing foundational militia concepts and conspiracies. Additionally, while the pandemic accelerated QAnon’s appeal to militia members, the 2020 election cemented this trend. This paper assesses that, in the future, QAnon’s growing presence within the militia-sphere will increase convergences between militias and other far-right groups, as well as draw individuals from the mainstream into the militia-sphere.

In this report, Tech Against Terrorism investigates the use of designation: a powerful tool available to governments to facilitate improved action against terrorist use of the internet in a way that upholds the rule of law.
We detail how terrorist designation differs from one jurisdiction to another. We argue that these counterterrorism measures, whether online or offline, must be grounded: judiciary systems must be brought into the 21st century when designating terrorism. In the context of terrorist use of the internet, governments and legislatures must take ownership of the problem, rather than leave the issue to tech companies who must second guess fragmented and incoherent designation processes.

Deplatforming websites—removing infrastructure services they need to operate, such as website hosting—can reduce the spread and reach of extremism and hate online, but when does deplatforming succeed? This report shows that deplatforming can decrease the popularity of extremist websites, especially when done without warning. We present four case studies of English-language, U.S.-based extremist websites that were deplatformed: the Daily Stormer, 8chan/8kun, TheDonald.win/Patriots.win, and Nicholas Fuentes/America First. In all of these cases, the infrastructure service providers considered deplatforming only after highly publicized or violent events, indicating that at the infrastructure level, the bar to deplatforming is high. All of the site administrators in these four cases also elected to take measures to remain online after they were deplatformed. To understand how deplatforming affected these sites, we collected and analyzed publicly available data that measures website-popularity rankings over time.

We learned four important lessons about how deplatforming affects extremist websites:

• It can cause popularity rankings to decrease immediately.
• It may take users a long time to return to the website. Sometimes, the website never regains its previous popularity.
• Unexpected deplatforming makes it take longer for the website to regain its previous popularity levels.
• Replicating deplatformed services such as discussion forums or live-streaming video products on a stand-alone website presents significant challenges, including higher costs and smaller audiences.

Our findings show that fighting extremism online requires not only better content moderation and more transparency from social media companies but also cooperation from infrastructure providers like Cloudflare, GoDaddy, and Google, which have avoided attention and critique.

Increasingly, global society is focused on the harm caused by material accessed on the internet. Individuals of all ages and backgrounds–policy makers, academics, politicians, mental health professionals, medical professionals and the general public–are seeking to understand the processes that govern the relationship between exposure to harmful content online and later harmful cognitions and behaviors. Several commentators have placed into stark focus several questions surrounding the use (and misuse) of the internet, and prevention of harm from it. Three issues come immediately to mind: First, what can be done to prevent the manifestation of harmful activities stemming from being online? Second, what is the underlying relationship between harmful material accessed online, and harmful behavioral outcomes? And third, what is the best approach (and how to we know what the “best” is) to prevent the manifestation of harmful behavior stemming from harmful content online? Rather than looking at each of these issues as a stovepipe, and seeking to answer each in isolation, in this chapter we adopt an integrationist perspective on the issue of preventing online harm online. Specifically, we will look at the theories of how and why exposure to extreme and harmful material online can cause negative real-world outcomes. We focus on the innovative Google-led program Jigsaw, 1 to explore the many and varied approaches that can be adopted to challenge and counter the issues of extreme and harmful material online. Finally, leveraging new approaches from public health (Su et al., 2021; Shortland et al., 2021), we outline the major ethical, practical, and theoretical issues that pervade technology-based efforts to tackle the issue of extreme and harmful material online.

Since the fall of the Caliphate, the activities and overall threat posed by Western jihadists has undoubtedly diminished. 1 A recent study released by the Program on Extremism, for example, demonstrated a steady decline in jihadist activity in the United States (US) since 2020. In this three-year period, only twenty-nine Americans have been charged, compared to eighty-two in the previous three years. 2 Similarly, Europe has experienced a steady annual reduction in jihadist arrests from 718 in 2016 to 260 in 2021.3 This is the second period since 9/11 where there has been a marked decline in the ability to radicalize and mobilize people to support the jihadi movement or conduct attacks in the West. 4 Whether or not the cycle of (relative) success and decline will repeat itself depends on a number of factors, some of which are harder to predict than others. What is clear for now is that there remains a pool of committed Western jihadists who are working to keep the movement alive in the US and Europe in hope that future opportunities for mass mobilization may arise. This report investigates how Western jihadists and efforts to radicalize Westerners have adapted to the post-Caliphate reality and the current downward trajectory and complements the Program’s recent quantitative analysis of the Islamic State (IS) threat in the US Some Western jihadi strategies have remained the same, such as the calls to conduct lone actor attacks in the West. However, there have been some marked shifts in strategic communications. For instance, in some cases the discourse about Muslim grievances resembles those that were prevalent during the previous lull in Western jihadist activity, such as a refocusing on Muslim prisoners in the West. The report opens with an overview of how Western jihadists have responded to the online post-Caliphate world in which many of the online platforms popular among jihadists have become increasingly proactive in removing jihadist accounts and content. Here, there is evidence of a reversion to an earlier, pre-Caliphate, era of online jihadism in which much activity and file sharing took place on forums rather than mainstream social media platforms.

Online platforms have banned (“deplatformed”) influencers, communities, and even entire websites to reduce content deemed harmful. Deplatformed users often migrate to alternative platforms, which raises concerns about the effectiveness of deplatforming. Here, we study the deplatforming of Parler, a fringe social media platform, between 2021 January 11 and 2021 February 25, in the aftermath of the US Capitol riot. Using two large panels that capture longitudinal user-level activity across mainstream and fringe social media content (N = 112, 705, adjusted to be representative of US desktop and mobile users), we find that other fringe social media, such as Gab and Rumble, prospered after Parler’s deplatforming. Further, the overall activity on fringe social media increased while Parler was offline. Using a difference-in-differences analysis (N = 996), we then identify the causal effect of deplatforming on active Parler users, finding that deplatforming increased the probability of daily activity across other fringe social media in early 2021 by 10.9 percentage points (pp) (95% CI [5.9 pp, 15.9 pp]) on desktop devices, and by 15.9 pp (95% CI [10.2 pp, 21.7 pp]) on mobile devices, without decreasing activity on fringe social media in general (including Parler). Our results indicate that the isolated deplatforming of a major fringe platform was ineffective at reducing overall user activity on fringe social media.