https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4663-7344
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ABSTRACT
Understanding how extremist Salafists communicate, and not only what, is key to gaining insights into the ways they construct their social order and use psychological forces to radicalize potential sympathizers on social media. With a view to contributing to the existing body of research which mainly focuses on terrorist organizations, we analyzed accounts that advocate violent jihad without supporting (at least publicly) any terrorist group and hence might be able to reach a large and not yet radicalized audience. We constructed a critical multimodal and multidisciplinary framework of discourse patterns that may work as potential triggers to a selection of key cognitive biases and we applied it to a corpus of Facebook posts published by seven extremist Salafists. Results reveal how these posts are either based on an intense crisis construct (through negative outgroup nomination, intensification and emotion) or on simplistic solutions composed of taken-for-granted statements. Devoid of any grey zone, these posts do not seek to convince the reader; polarization is framed as a presuppositional established reality. These observations reveal that extremist Salafist communication is constructed in a way that may trigger specific cognitive biases, which are discussed in the paper.
Data availability statement
This research is based on a corpus of Facebook posts, some of which promote violent jihad and can be considered as security-sensitive materials. The availability of such datasets in public repositories is not recommended but the corresponding author will be happy to share this dataset with researchers upon request.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Notes on contributors
Catherine Bouko
Catherine Bouko (PhD, Université libre de Bruxelles) is Assistant Professor in communication at the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication at Ghent University (Belgium). Her general research interests lay on citizenship, identity and ideology in the digital world, especially in multimodal social media content. Her main research methods belong to semiotics as well as content and discourse analysis.
Brigitte Naderer
Brigitte Naderer, (PhD, University of Vienna) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Media and Communication at LMU Munich (Germany). Her research focuses on persuasive communication, media literacy, and effects of media use on children’s and adolescents’ well-being.
Diana Rieger
Diana Rieger (PhD, University of Cologne) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Media and Communication at LMU Munich (Germany). Her research focuses on extremist communication, hate speech and the effects of entertainment media on wellbeing related outcomes.
Pieter Van Ostaeyen
Pieter Van Ostaeyen is a historian, Arabist, and PhD student at the University of Leuven (Belgium), specialist of the Islamic State. He is the author of three books on Jihadism: ISIS Incubators: The Emergence of Salafi Jihadism in Europe (2014, co-author), Van Kruistochten tot Kalifaat (2015) and Staat van Terreur. De Jihadistische Revolutie (2016).
Pierre Voué
Pierre Voué is a data scientist at Textgain (Belgium). His work centers around online hate speech, polarization and extremism through big data analyses.