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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.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

Online behaviour can provide a unique window from which we can glean intent. From an intelligence standpoint it provides an important source of open-source information. However, making inference of intent from online activity is inherently difficult. Yet elsewhere progress is being made in incorporating information online into decisions regarding risk and offender prioritisation. This chapter synthesises lessons learnt from studies of risk assessment of violent extremists, risk assessment online, and the form and function of extremist materials online in order to begin to approach the issue of online risk assessment of violent extremism. In doing so it highlights issues associated with the diversity of online extremist behaviour, the diversity of offline extremist behaviour and the general lack of understanding related to the interaction of online and offline experiences, and how this contributes to the wider psychological process of ‘radicalisation’. Implications for practitioners are discussed.

In recent years, Hezbollah has used social media to recruit Israeli Arabs and West Bank-based Palestinians to attack Israeli targets. A recent innovation in terrorist tactics has given rise to “virtual entrepreneurs,” which to date have been largely associated with the Islamic State’s online recruitment efforts. Hezbollah’s virtual planners, similar to those in the Islamic State, use social media to establish contact with potential recruits before transitioning to more encrypted communications platforms, transferring funds, and issuing instructions to form cells, conduct surveillance, and carry out terrorist attacks. Online recruitment presents a low-cost option that offers plausible deniability for Hezbollah. While every virtual plot led by Hezbollah that targeted Israel has been foiled thus far, Israeli authorities spend time and resources disrupting these schemes at the expense of other more pressing threats. By digitally recruiting Palestinians to attack Israel, Hezbollah and its patron Iran are seeking to cultivate a new front against Israel amid rising regional hostilities.

This roundtable discussion presents a dialogue between digital culture scholars on the seemingly increased presence of hating and hate speech online. Revolving primarily around the recent #GamerGate campaign of intensely misogynistic discourse aimed at women in video games, the discussion suggests that the current moment for hate online needs to be situated historically. From the perspective of intersecting cultural histories of hate speech, discrimination, and networked communication, we interrogate the ontological specificity of online hating before going on to explore potential responses to the harmful consequences of hateful speech. Finally, a research agenda for furthering the historical understandings of
contemporary online hating is suggested in order to address the urgent need for scholarly interventions into the exclusionary cultures of networked media.

The study aims to capture links between the use of encrypted communication channel -Telegram and lone wolf attacks occurred in Europe between 2015-2016. To understand threads of ISIS communication on Telegram we used digital ethnography approach which consists of the self-observation of information flows on four of ISIS’s most celebrated telegram Channels. We draw on public sphere theory and coined the term terror socio-sphere 3.0 as the theoretical background of this study. The collected data is presented as screenshots to capture a visual evidence of ISIS communication threads. This study shows that ISIS Telegram channels play critical role in personal communication between potential recruits and dissemination of propaganda that encourage ‘lone wolves’ to carry attacks in the world at large. This study was limited to the number of the channels that have been widely celebrated.