Social Media

By Sean McCafferty In recent years there has been suggestion of a tech backslide by major social media platforms, leading to a reduction in proactive content moderation. This has become a significant concern for scholars of online terrorism. This blog post examines a sample of empirical data from Facebook that suggests there is a resurgence ...

By Nauval El Ghifari Extremism in the Age of Short Form Content Over the past decade, online extremism has not disappeared so much as it has changed form. Earlier expressions were concentrated on closed forums and ideological websites; contemporary ones increasingly surface within mainstream social media. What has shifted is not the presence of extremist ...

By Joshua Skoczylis and John Babalola The question is no longer whether social media platforms influence politics. They do. The question is whether democratic life can endure when the central infrastructure of public communication is engineered to reward extremism, disinformation, and division — and when its owners are increasingly invested in this outcome. The far ...

By Sam David UpScrolled, a social media platform for microblogging and short-form video sharing, experienced rapid growth in late January 2026 following disputes surrounding TikTok’s US operations. The expansion was initiated largely by allegations that protest-related content was being suppressed on mainstream platforms and, while independent verification of this is limited, the perception of such ...

By Alessandro Bolpagni, Eleonora Ristuccia, and Grazia Ludovica Giardini More than ten years ago, Halummu launched an online campaign entitled “Supporting Ribat and Jihad” to urge IS munasirin to spread IS propaganda material “to as many platforms and accounts as possible”, underlying that the “ongoing war between the camp of kufr and the camp of ...

By Mischa Gerrard Online extremism research tends to treat gendered AI-enabled harms – such as non-consensual sexual deepfakes and synthetic child sexual abuse material (CSAM) – as peripheral to core radicalisation mechanisms. Yet these harms represent more than isolated safety problems. Rather, they function as early-stage enabling infrastructures through which new techniques of coercion, evidentiary ...

By Human Digital Introduction Across the 10th and 11th September 2025, people seeking footage of the shooting of Charlie Kirk triggered a 110% increase in total visitor numbers to 21 gore sites (Figure 1). As detailed in Human Digital’s VOX-Pol report, Gore & Violent Extremism, those visitors will have been exposed to videos involving graphic ...

By Sara Hill When an extremist opened fire on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, murdering 51 people and injuring many more in 2019, headlines around the world began talking about ‘ecofascists’, a label the shooter had claimed in his manifesto. When that attack was followed by another a few years later using the same ...

By Francesca Gentile and Isabella Gomez O’Keefe Our recent research, presented at the VOX-Pol Next Gen Conference in Prague, explored how far-right extremist accounts on TikTok use coded language to evade content moderation systems in order to establish and reinforce in-group and out-group identities; recruit, radicalise, and mobilise individuals; and spread disinformation, conspiracy theories, and ...

Nicholas A.R. Fraser, Senior Research Associate, Toronto Metropolitan University Most of us, whether we admit it or not, engage in a great deal of passive scrolling through social media daily. And while the platforms have proliferated for years, experts are only now beginning to demonstrate their full impact on our attention, mental health, spending habits and politics. Despite the benefits, social ...