Introduction to the Special Issue: Extremism and Terrorism Online—Widening the Research Base

In 2017, also in a special issue of Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, this one titled “Terrorist Online Propaganda and Radicalization,” ¹ one of the coeditors of this issue, Conway, made six suggestions for progressing research on the role of the Internet in violent extremism and terrorism. ² These were to (1) widen the range of types of online violent extremism and terrorism being studied beyond violent jihadis, especially the so-called Islamic State (IS); (2) compare, not just across ideologies, but also groups, countries, languages and social media platforms; (3) deepen analyses to include interviewing and virtual ethnographic approaches; (4) up-scale or improve our capacity to undertake “big data” collection and analysis; (5) outreach beyond terrorism studies to become acquainted with, in particular, the Internet Studies literature and engage in interdisciplinary research with, for example, computer scientists; and (6) pay more attention to gender as a factor in online extremism and terrorism. If Conway’s call was to be summed up in a single word, however, it is probably “widening.” In her 2017 article she emphasizes in her first suggestion the widening of research on the role of the Internet in extremism and terrorism beyond a narrow focus on violent jihadi online content and interactions, especially that of IS, but in effect her additional suggestions to compare, deepen, upscale, outreach, and pay closer attention to gender are all requests to widen our efforts in different directions. This special issue seeks to showcase research that widens the research base yet further, with all the articles not only implicitly or explicitly taking up Conway’s suggestions, but also going beyond them.

The opening two articles in the collection take up the initial two suggestions in “Six Suggestions” to “widen” and “compare.” The first article is an example of “upscaling” too, while the second showcases the results of “outreach” to computer science colleagues.

In “Six Suggestions,” Conway calls for online extremism and terrorism researchers to widen their analyses beyond particularly IS and points to the extreme right as “particularly worth consideration.” ³ In the first of two articles in the special issue lead-authored by Weeda Mehran, she and colleagues compare a sample of text content posted in UK- and U.S.-focused far-right online spaces (e.g., American Renaissance, Daily Stormer, Rebel Media, Britain First) with that produced by jihadists, including not just IS, but also Al Qaeda, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, and the Taliban. Specifically, the article presents findings from a comparative analysis of a total of just over 7.5 million words of online text, with just shy of 6.5 million words of the analyzed text collected from far-right online spaces and just over 1.1 million from violent jihadi cyberspaces, with a view to determining the similarities and differences in far-right and violent jihadis’ online linguistic patterns. The research findings shed light on the similarities and differences in the cognitive, social, psychological, and temporal dimensions of language used by adherents to the different ideologies. For example, both types of text display the same level of certainty in arguments as a cognitive process, but with language depicting social and emotional processes and religion used more often by the violent jihadi extremists than their far-right counterparts. Violent jihadi extremists were also found to be more likely than far-right extremists to discuss the future and promise change as motivational incentives.

In their article, Conway et al. are plain about their desire to widen their treatment of online violent jihadism beyond IS. The interdisciplinary team of social and computer scientists accomplishes this by comparing IS’s 2017 and 2018 Twitter activity with the Twitter activity of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and Ahrar al-Sham (AAS) during the same period. Their detailed comparative analysis shows how groups that share broadly the same ideology were treated quite differently by Twitter, in terms of the levels of disruption each was subjected to, which, in turn, affected each groups’ broader online freedom to act. Importantly, Conway and colleagues’ work also extended beyond Twitter to identify and analyze the nature and workings of the other online platforms (e.g., traditional websites, other social media platforms, content upload sites) on which IS, HTS, and AAS were active in 2017 and 2018. By researching and analyzing these other online spaces and their functionalities, this work also contributes to the growing literature on extremist and terrorist online ecologies, including how these are conceptualized and methods for “snapshotting” them.

Absent from Conway’s 2017 article, but underlined by her in a keynote address at the 2017 Terrorism and Social Media (TASM) conference and a later blog post, was the need for a “visual turn” among online extremism and terrorism researchers. ⁴ In fact, not only are still images now receiving considerably more attention in our field, as illustrated by Nouri et al.’s article herein and a host of other recent publications, ⁵ but an emergent focus on the multimodality of especially contemporary terrorist online content is also apparent. ⁶ Mehran et al. are explicit about this in the subtitle of their article on Taliban videos, which emphasizes the group’s “Differential Use of Multimodal, Visual and Sonic Forms Across Strategic Themes.” Robinson and Whittaker’s description and discussion of text, images, symbols, and, crucially, interactive play in their article on gaming also points in this direction.

Nouri et al.’s article describes and analyzes the changes in Britain First’s visual strategy in the course of its forced 2018 migration from Facebook to Gab. The study found notable changes in the visuals shared on Gab, a site with a largely right-wing user base, versus those that had been shared on Facebook. In particular, the Gab images privileged depiction of the group’s core members rather than Britons more generally—but as narrowly conceived by them, especially as being overwhelmingly White—as on Facebook and expanded “othering” practices to Islam and Muslims broadly, instead of just Islamic extremism and extremists as in their Facebook visuals. Nouri et al. interpreted these findings as likely resulting from the less regulated nature of Gab versus Facebook. This research adds, furthermore, to the burgeoning literature showing that deplatforming works, in the sense that the number of users that follow groups, such as Britain First, or prominent users, such as Britain First’s leaders’ Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen, from major platforms to more obscure online spaces decline on each such move. In fact, this greater level of intimacy may account, the authors point out, for the shift in esthetic choice from the posting of more polished visuals on Facebook to their displayed preference for more “everyday” or amateur images on Gab.

In contrast to Britain First, ⁷ the Taliban’s extensive online presence has not been widely studied to date, with their video content particularly underresearched. Mehran et al.’s article first identifies and analyzes the predominant themes in a sample of 90 Taliban videos and then explores the multimodal aspects of a subset of 226 segments of these. Multimodal analysis essentially investigates how meaning arises from the integration of language, image and sound, with studies adopting a multimodal approach generally investigating how different modes combine and interact to communicate meaning. Mehran et al.’s article contributes to the broader literature on online jihadi content by going beyond not just textual but also visual analysis, to examine how the Taliban combine sonic and visual forms in their videos to convey meaning and attract audience attention. For example, the authors found that Taliban videos depicting oppression and suffering and those having a public relations function were more likely than other types of videos to utilize multiple layers of media and complex camera angles.

With regard to gaming, the online harassment campaign against women in computer gaming known as “Gamergate” had both right-wing extremist and violent misogynist elements. ⁸ And the gaming community and their platforms were again implicated in right-wing extremist activity when Discord—“Free Voice and Text Chat for Gamers” ⁹ —was shown to have been used extensively in right-wing extremists’ preparations for the 2017 Charlottesville rally and, indeed, thereafter. ¹⁰ It is appropriate therefore that discussions of widening our research base should include attention to gaming, which is the subject of Nick Robinson and Joe Whittaker’s article. Their article underlines too how our findings can be enriched by outreach to other subfields and disciplines, one of Conway’s original “Six Suggestions.” ¹¹ In their article, Robinson and Whittaker draw from game studies to argue, among other things, that the extant literature on extremism, terrorism, and games/gaming overly emphasizes game content—a critique that can also be made of online extremism and terrorism research more generally—and that greater attention should instead be paid to interactive gameplay: “It is through the undertaking of in-game actions that a player comes to experience a group’s values and aims,” say the authors. ¹² The article thus also has an implicit multimodal focus.

Ethics was mentioned briefly by Conway in the conclusion of “Six Suggestions” as one of “a whole host of issues” that it was not possible to address in the article. ¹³ And, in fact, one of the projects emerging from the TASM 2019 post-conference “sandpit” event was the Researcher Security, Safety and Resilience (REASSURE) project, which is concerned with a matter of practical ethics: the welfare of online extremism and terrorism researchers. ¹⁴ Taking a different angle in their article, Adam Henschke and Alastair Reed grapple with more macro-level issues around developing an ethical framework for countering online extremist and terrorist propaganda. Their concern is that many of the rapidly deployed responses to this threat (e.g., disruption, redirection, countermessaging) have not been sufficiently well thought through from free speech, privacy, transparency, and numerous other, broadly ethics, perspectives. “[W]ithout an ethically informed response,” say Henschke and Reed, “governments and other relevant decision makers can fall prey to ad hoc decision making which is, in fact, biased, unfair, unjustified or simply inexplicable.” ¹⁵

Like the Taliban, the online activity of Africa-based jihadi groups, including al-Shabab and Boko Haram, remains underresearched. ¹⁶ Rather than directly addressing Boko Haram’s online activity however, in the closing article of the collection, Jacob Zenn takes an interestingly different angle, addressing the ongoing scholarly debate regarding Boko Haram’s 2002 − 2003 founding and 2009 − 2010 militant turn and the use of “Internet sources” to evidence or deny aspects of these pivotal moments in the group’s evolution. Zenn argues for the utility of both what’s sometimes termed “digital trace data” and other times “born digital” data, in this case produced and circulated by jihadists, and digitized data, in this case located, seized, and uploaded to the Internet by U.S. government actors, in researching Boko Haram. While reliance on digital trace data is at the core of online extremism and terrorism research, the diverse attitudes of scholars largely concerned with a group’s “real world” activity to such data are noteworthy. Controversy regarding the veracity of hard copy documents made publicly available online (i.e., digitized sources) is also worth noting, not just in regard to local Boko Haram researchers’ attitudes to the documents discussed in Zenn’s article, but some researchers’ concerns surrounding such digitized data generally. ¹⁷

In terms of Conway’s “Six Suggestions,” just two are not taken up in the articles composing this special issue: her invitations to (3) deepen analyses and (6) pay more attention to gender in online extremism and terrorism. With regard to the latter, there is now a growing literature on female involvement in online extremist and terrorist cyberspaces, ¹⁸ female online radicalization, ¹⁹ the depiction of women and girls in online extremist and terrorist content, ²⁰ and female-targeted online content, ²¹ albeit with a focus on IS tending to predominate still. Having said this, the role of gender—qua social and cultural norms and distinctions based on sex—rather than the role of women in online extremism and terrorism is still understudied, with available reflections on these appearing in publications outside of those preferred by online extremism and terrorism scholars. ²² In terms of points of crossover with articles included herein, Conway’s 2017 article pointed out that “[o]nline gender-switching has been extensively studied in online gaming” and then enquired, “What is the likelihood of high levels of gender-switching in, say, jihadi online spaces?” Female “infiltration” into ostensibly “male only” jihadi online spaces remains a thoroughly unexplored issue ²³ —undoubtedly due, at least in part, to the difficulty of empirically studying it—for example, despite evidence of it being relatively commonplace. ²⁴ Of all Conway’s suggestions, it is (3) that calls for deepening of our analyses via interviewing and virtual or digital ethnography—sometimes also called “netnography” ²⁵ —that remains the most elusive. Again, there are significant practical impediments to utilizing these approaches, not least obtaining institutional ethical approval for research that might require interaction with—as opposed to, say, passive observation of—extremists and terrorists. Nonetheless, as the shorthand descriptor “deepening” points to, both approaches could be expected to generate more fine-grained data and analysis than is presently available regarding individual extremists’ and terrorists’ online content consumption, interactions, and other decision making and activity.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that the seven articles composing this special issue were selected from those delivered at Swansea University’s second biennial international conference on Terrorism and Social Media (#TASMConf), which took place on 25–26 June 2019. Organized by Swansea University’s Cyber Threats Research Center, the conference registered 236 delegates from 23 countries. In addition to academic researchers, these delegates included representatives from a wide range of nonacademic stakeholders, including policymakers, law enforcement, social media companies and think tanks. The keynote speakers were VOX-Pol research fellow and author of Extremism, ²⁶ J. M. Berger and Dr. Krisztina Huszti-Orban, senior legal adviser to the UN Special Rapporteur on Counterterrorism and Human Rights. ²⁷ The conference concluded with the session “In Conversation with the GIFCT [Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism],” ²⁸ which featured Will McCants (Google’s Global Public Policy lead for hate speech and terrorism), Dr. Erin Marie Saltman (Facebook’s policy manager overseeing counterterrorism and counterextremism efforts in Europe, the Middle East and Africa) and Adam Hadley (founder and director of Tech Against Terrorism ²⁹ ). In addition, a total of 74 others presented their research into extremists and terrorists’ use of the Internet and allied issues across 25 breakout panels over the two days. The articles included herein showcase some of that research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Anne Aly, Stuart Macdonald, Lee Jarvis, and Thomas M. Chen, “Introduction to the Special Issue: Terrorist Online Propaganda and Radicalization,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 40, no. 1 (2017): 1–9.

2 Maura Conway, “Determining the Role of the Internet in Violent Extremism and Terrorism: Six Suggestions for Progressing Research,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 40, no. 1 (2017): 77–98.

3 Ibid., 83.

4 Video footage of Conway’s 2017 TASM Conference keynote is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHGagVxQkLo; her November 2019 VOX-Pol Blog post, “We Need a Visual Turn in Violent Online Extremism Research,” is at https://www.voxpol.eu/we-need-a-visual-turn-in-violent-online-extremism-research/ (accessed August 12).

5 See, for example, Aaron Anfinson, “The Treachery of Images: Visualizing ‘Statehood’ as a Tactic for the Legitimization of Non-State Actors,” Terrorism and Political Violence [Online First; 2019] Emil Archambault and Yannick Veilleux-Lepage, “Drone Imagery in Islamic State Propaganda: Flying Like a State,” International Affairs 96, no. 4 (2020): 955–973. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09546553.2019.1585818; Stephane J. Baele, Katharine A. Boyd, and Travis G. Coan, “Lethal Images: Analyzing Extremist Visual Propaganda from ISIS and Beyond,” Journal of Global Security Studies (2019) [Online First]. https://academic.oup.com/jogss/article-abstract/5/4/634/5660402; Maura Conway, Jodie Parker, and Sean Looney, “Online Jihadi Instructional Content: The Role of Magazines,” in Terrorists’ Use of the Internet: Assessment and Response, ed. Maura Conway, Lee Jarvis, Orla Lehane, Stuart Macdonald, and Lella Nouri (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2017); Julia R. DeCook, “Memes and Symbolic Violence: #proudboys and the Use of Memes for Propaganda and the Construction of Collective Identity,” Learning, Media and Technology 43, no. 4 (2018): 485–504; Stuart Macdonald and Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, “Visual Jihad: Constructing the ‘Good Muslim’ in Online Jihadist Magazines,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (2019) [Online First]. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1057610X.2018.1559508; Amy-Louise Watkin and Seán Looney, “‘The Lions of Tomorrow’: A News Value Analysis of Child Images in Jihadi Magazines,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 42, no. 1/2 (2019): 120–140; Savvas Zannettou, Tristan Caulfield, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini, and Guillermo Suarez-Tangil, “On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities,” IMC ‘18: Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018 (New York, NY, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), October 2018), 188–202.

6 See, for example, Lilie Chouliaraki and Angelos Kissas, “The Communication of Horrorism: A Typology of ISIS Online Death Videos,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 35, no. 1 (2018): 24–39; Roxanne L. Euben, “Spectacles of Sovereignty in Digital Time: ISIS Executions, Visual Rhetoric and Sovereign Power,” Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 4 (2017): 1007–1033; Daniel Koehler, “Fake It Till You Make It? Representation of Special Operations Forces Capabilities in Jihadist Propaganda Videos,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (2020) [Online First]. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1057610X.2020.1780014; Pieter Nanninga, Branding a Caliphate in Decline: The Islamic State’s Video Output (2015–2018) (The Hague: ICCT, 2019); Mark D. Robinson and Cori E. Dauber, “Grading the Quality of ISIS Videos: A Metric for Assessing the Technical Sophistication of Digital Video Propaganda,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 42, no. 1/2 (2019): 17–87; Jacob Zenn, “Chronicling the Boko Haram Decade in Nigeria (2010–2020): Distinguishing Factions Through Videographic Analysis,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 31, no. 66 (2020): 1242–1294. For an alternative take on “multimodality” in online extremism, see Sabine Tan, Kay L. O’Halloran, Peter Wignell, Kevin Chai, and Rebecca Lange, “A Multimodal Mixed Methods Approach for Examining Recontextualisation Patterns of Violent Extremist Images in Online Media,” Discourse, Context & Media 21 (2018): 18–35.

7 See, for example, Chris Allen, “Britain First: The ‘Frontline Resistance’ to the Islamification of Britain,” The Political Quarterly 85, no. 3 (2014): 354–361; Andrew Brindle and Corrie MacMillan, “Like and Share if You Agree: A Study of Discourses and Cyber Activism of the Far-Right British Nationalist Party Britain First,” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 5, no. 1 (2017): 108–133; Shani Burke, “The Discursive ‘Othering’ of Jews and Muslims in the Britain First Solidarity Patrol,” Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology 28, no. 5 (2018): 365–377; Thomas Davidson and Mabel Berezin, “Britain First and the UK Independence Party: Social Media and Movement-Party Dynamics,” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 23, no. 4 (2018): 485–510; Lella Nouri and Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, “Investigating Reclaim Australia and Britain First’s Use of Social Media: Developing a New Model of Imagined Political Communities Online,” Journal for Deradicalization No. 18 (2019): 1–37.

8 Andrea Braithwaite, “It’s About Ethics in Games Journalism? Gamergaters and Geek Masculinity,” Social Media + Society 2, no. 4 (2016): 1–10; Matt Lees, “What Gamergate Should Have Taught Us About the ‘Alt-right,’” The Guardian, 1 December 2016.

9 It has since rebranded; see Abram Brown, “Discord Was Once the Alt-Right’s Favorite Chat App. Now It’s Gone Mainstream and Scored a New $3.5 Billion Valuation, Forbes, 30 June 2020.

10 Maura Conway, Ryan Scrivens, and Logan Macnair, Right-Wing Extremists’ Persistent Online Presence: History and Contemporary Trends (The Hague: ICCT, 2019), 14–15.

11 Conway, “Determining the Role of the Internet,” 88–89.

12 Nick Robinson and Joe Whittaker, “Playing for Hate? Extremism, Terrorism, and Videogames,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (this issue).

13 Conway, “Determining the Role of the Internet,” 92; see also Maura Conway, “Ethics Issues, Challenges, and Dilemmas for Online Extremism and Terrorism Researchers,” Terrorism and Political Violence (forthcoming 2021).

14 For more, see https://www.voxpol.eu/introducing-the-reassure-project/ (accessed August 12).

15 Adam Henschke and Alastair Reed, “Towards an Ethical Framework for Countering Extremist Propaganda Online,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (this issue).

16 Conway, “Determining the Role of the Internet,” 84.

17 Elizabeth Redden, “Controversy Over an ISIS Archive,” Inside Higher Ed, 27 September 2018. The “The ISIS Files Mission Statement and Code of Ethics” is at https://isisfiles.gwu.edu/ethics. See also Rukmini Callimachi, “Experts Divided on Authenticity of Islamic State Receipts,” The New York Times, 14 November 2019 and Maryam Saleh, “Protection or Plunder? A US Journalist Took Thousands of ISIS Files Out of Iraq, Reigniting a Bitter Dispute Over the Theft of Iraqi History,” The Intercept, 23 May 2018.

18 See, for example, Galit M. Ben-Israel, “Telling a Story Via Tumblr Analytics: Europe’s Young Muslim Female Attraction to ISIS,” International Annals of Criminology 56, no. 1/2 (2018): 55–78; Pedro Manrique1, Zhenfeng Cao1, Andrew Gabriel, John Horgan, Paul Gill, Hong Qi1, Elvira M. Restrepo, Daniela Johnson, Stefan Wuchty, Chaoming Song, and Neil Johnson, “Women’s Connectivity in Extreme Networks,” Science Advances 2, no. 6 (2016): 1–6; Elizabeth Pearson, “Online as the New Frontline: Affect, Gender, and ISIS-Take-Down on Social Media,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 41, no. 11 (2018): 850–874; Aunshul Rege and Scott VanZant, “Examining the Roles of Muhajirahs in the Islamic State via Twitter,” Proceedings of the International Conference on Cyber Situational Awareness, Data Analytics and Assessment (Cyber SA) (2019): 1–8.

19 See, for example, Lauren R. Shapiro and Marie-Helen Maras, “Women’s Radicalization to Religious Terrorism: An Examination of ISIS Cases in the United States,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 42, no. 1/2 (2018): 88–119; Elizabeth Pearson, “The Case of Roshonara Choudhry: Implications for Theory on Online Radicalization, ISIS Women, and the Gendered Jihad,” Policy & Internet 8, no. 1 (2016): 5–33; Leah Windsor, “The Language of Radicalization: Female Internet Recruitment to Participation in ISIS Activities,” Terrorism and Political Violence 32, no. 3 (2020): 506–538.

20 See, for example, Orla Lehane, David Mair, Saffron Lee, and Jodie Parker, “Brides, Black Widows and Baby-Makers; or Not: An Analysis of the Portrayal of Women in English-Language Jihadi Magazine Image Content,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 11, no. 3 (2018): 505–520; Watkin and Looney, “‘The Lions of Tomorrow.’”

21 See, for example, Bidisha Biswas and Shirin Deylami, “Radicalizing Female Empowerment: Gender, Agency, and Affective Appeals in Islamic State Propaganda,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 30, no. 6/7 (2019): 1193–1213; Melissa Frances Johnston and Muhammad Iqbal, “The Lure of (Violent) Extremism: Gender Constructs in Online Recruitment and Messaging in Indonesia,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (2020) [Online First]. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1057610X.2020.1759267; Mojtaba Heidarysafa, Kamran Kowsari, Tolu Odukoya, Philip Potter, Laura E. Barnes, and Donald E. Brown, “Women in ISIS Propaganda: A Natural Language Processing Analysis of Topics and Emotions in a Comparison with a Mainstream Religious Group,” in Intelligent Computing: Proceedings of the 2020 Computing Conference, Volume 2, ed. Kohei Arai, Supriya Kapoor, and Rahul Bhatia (Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2020), 610–624; Suleyman Ozeren, Hakan Hekim, M. Salih Elmas, and Halil Ibrahim Canbegi, “An Analysis of ISIS Propaganda and Recruitment Activities Targeting the [Female] Turkish-Speaking Population,” International Annals of Criminology 56, no. 1/2 (2018): 105–121.

22 See, for example, Andrew Brindle, “The Object of Subordination is Immaterial: Discursive Constructions of Masculinity in a Far-Right Online Forum, in Queering Masculinities in Language and Culture, ed. Paul Bakerand Giuseppe Balirano (London: Palgrave, 2017), 251–275; Shuki J. Cohen, Thomas J. Holt, Steven M. Chermak, and Joshua D. Freilich, “Invisible Empire of Hate: Gender Differences in the Ku Klux Klan’s Online Justifications for Violence,” Violence and Gender 5, no. 4 (2018): 209–222; Elisa Impara, “A Social Semiotics Analysis of Islamic State’s Use of Beheadings: Images of Power, Masculinity, Spectacle and Propaganda,” International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 53 (2018): 25–45; Anna Johansson, ‘ISIS-Chan: The Meanings of the Manga Girl in Image Warfare Against the Islamic State, Critical Studies on Terrorism 11, no. 1 (2018): 1–25; Jessica Johnson, “Affective Radicalization and White Masculinity,” Feminist Media Studies 19, no. 2 (2019): 297–299. For a description and discussion of the scholarly journals in which online extremism and terrorism researchers routinely publish, see Louise Laing and Maura Conway, “Where to Publish Academic Research on Online Extremism and Terrorism? What Can we Learn from Journal Article Entries in VOX-Pol’s Online Library,” VOX-Pol Blog, 7 May 2020, https://www.voxpol.eu/where-to-publish-academic-research-on-online-extremism-and-terrorism/ (accessed August 12).

23 An exception is the following research note: Meili Criezis, “Online Deceptions: Renegotiating Gender Boundaries on ISIS Telegram,” Perspectives on Terrorism 14, no. 1 (2020): 67–73. See also Lizzie Dearden, “Safiyya Shaikh: How an Unemployed London Mother Ran an International Isis Propaganda Network,” Independent (UK), 4 July 2020.

24 Conway, “Determining the Role of the Internet,” 91.

25 Useful primers are Christine Hine, Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and Everyday (London and New York: Routledge, 2015); Robert Kozinets, Netnography: The Essential Guide to Qualitative Social Media Research (Third ed.) (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2019); Sarah Pink, Heather Horst, John Postill, Larissa Hjorth, Tania Lewis, and Jo Tacchi, Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice (London and California: Sage, 2015).

26 J. M. Berger, Extremism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018).

27 Recordings of their presentations are available at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWMKKjuEKyXeu_JG_eBP68Q/videos (accessed August 12).

28 GIFCT was established by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube in July 2017 to, per its website, “prevent terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms”; more information is at https://www.gifct.org/ (accessed August 12).

29 Tech Against Terrorism is an initiative launched and supported by the United Nations Counter Terrorism Executive Directorate that, per its website, works “with the global tech industry to tackle terrorist use of the internet whilst respecting human rights”; more information is at https://www.techagainstterrorism.org/ (accessed August 12).