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Islamist Buzzers: Message Flodding, Offline Outreach, and Astroturfing

Ario Seto

ASEAS - Austrian Journal of South-East Asian Studies, volume 12, issue 2 (2019), pp. 187-208

"Based on ethnographic research on Islamist buzzers – social media political operators tasked with making particular online conversation subjects trend – in Indonesia, this article details the process of how the proliferation of insensitive message in both the online and offline realms plays a r ... more

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Social Media in Africa: An Emerging Force for Autocrats and Activists

Geoffrey York

In: Media and Mass Atrocity: The Rwanda Genocide and Beyond

Allan Thompson (ed.)

Waterloo, Ontario: Centre for International Governance Innovation (2019), pp. 415-430

"The most extreme damage inflicted by social media can be seen in South Sudan. As documented in the chapter by Theo Dolan, social media in South Sudan has contributed to hatred and conflict among ethnic groups. Many investigators, including UN investigators, have warned that South Sudan's social med ... ia are triggering violence against ethnic groups. Since the beginning of the civil war in late 2013, social media has fuelled waves of hate speech that have provoked deadly violence and ethnic conflict in South Sudan, including massacres and other atrocities. In that sense, social media has become a new variation of the "hate radio" phenomenon that flourished in Rwanda before and during the 1994 genocide … Social media is also emerging as a powerful way to harass and intimidate the opponents of a regime or a political party. In this sense, it adds another weapon to the arsenal of a powerful regime that already has multiple weapons at its disposal. A regime can mobilize its supporters to use social media in a targeted way against its foes, or it can use its financial resources to create a fake army of fictional users on social media. In either case, it is tilting the playing field against its enemies. A targeted attack through social media can be more effective than the telephone threats or messages often deployed in the past. The use of social media can be more intimidating because it belittles the targeted person in front of a much bigger audience. The presence of this audience means that the attack is more damaging, more difficult to ignore and has the potential to mobilize large numbers of people against the victim … While social media is often used for anti-democratic purposes in Africa's authoritarian states, it has also been used as a force for reform, accountability and justice. It has helped to safeguard the fairness of elections. It has allowed greater scrutiny of potential threats, such as vote-rigging or violence, allowing citizens to be alerted when there is still a chance to prevent the worst abuses. It has put a spotlight on corruption and political wrongdoing, allowing activists to mobilize pressure on governments to resolve these long-neglected problems. In some cases, as it did in the Arab Spring, social media has played a role in toppling an authoritarian state. When an election was called in the small West African state of Gambia, where the dictator Yahya Jammeh had ruled for 22 years, opposition candidates had little access to state-controlled media. So the main opposition party created more than a dozen WhatsApp groups, allowing it to communicate with voters. Other forms of social media also proliferated. A leading independent group, the Gambia Youth and Women's Forum, discussed election issues on a public Facebook group with 55,000 members. The government blocked access to WhatsApp and eventually extended the shutdown to the entire internet, but Gambians used virtual private network (VPN) technology to bypass the shutdown. The opposition won the election and Jammeh was forced to flee the country." (Pages 419-423) more

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Mauritania Violent Extremism & Media Landscape Assessment: Desk Study & Field Analysis

USAID; International Business and Technical Consultants (IBTCI) (2019), 89 pp.

"The primary questions driving this assessment are: What are the principal drivers of extremism in Mauritania? What are the principal social fractures that have been, or could be, exploited by extremists? The table below displays the overall main drivers of VE in Mauritania, as well as the five subn ... more

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Reviewing the Role of the Internet in Radicalization Processes

Özen Odag, Anne Leiser, Klaus Boehnke

Journal for Deradicalization, issue 21 (2019), pp. 261-299

"This review presents the existing research on the role of the Internet in radicalization processes. Using a systematic literature search strategy, our paper yields 88 studies on the role of the Internet in a) right-wing extremism and b) radical jihadism. Available studies display a predominant inte ... more

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The Neurocognitive Process of Digital Radicalization: A Theoretical Model and Analytical Framework

Tiffiany Howard, Brach Poston, Stephen D. Benning

Journal for Deradicalization, issue 19 (2019), pp. 122-145

"Recent studies suggest that empathy induced by narrative messages can effectively facilitate persuasion and reduce psychological reactance. Although limited, emerging research on the etiology of radical political behavior has begun to explore the role of narratives in shaping an individual’s beli ... more

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Media and Mass Atrocity: The Rwanda Genocide and Beyond
Top Insights

Allan Thompson (ed.)

Waterloo, Ontario: Centre for International Governance Innovation (2019), x, 637 pp.

"The book includes an extensive section on the echoes of Rwanda, which looks at the cases of Darfur, the Central African Republic, Myanmar, and South Sudan, while the impact of social media as a new actor is examined through chapters on social media use by the Islamic State and in Syria and in other ... more

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Digital Jihad: Online Communication and Violent Extremism

Francesco Marone (ed.)

Milano: Ledizioni LediPublishing; Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale (ISPI) (2019), 156 pp.

"[...] this ISPI report aims to investigate the current landscape of jihadist online communication, including original empirical analysis. In doing so, the volume does not interpret the internet as a shapeless monolith but tries to highlight the opportunities and limitations of different digital pla ... more

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Reflect your past: Online-Radikalisierung

Manjana Sold

Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (bpb) (2019), 5 pp.

"Digitale Kommunikation spielt in unserem Alltag eine immer größere Rolle. Vor allem Jugendliche nutzen insbesondere das Internet zum Austausch mit Freund*innen als Informationsquelle und zur Unterhaltung. Extremistische Akteure wissen das und nutzen Internet-Plattformen und -Dienste zur Kommunika ... more

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A Typology of the Islamic State's Social Media Distribution Network

Yannick Veilleux-Lepage

In: Media and Mass Atrocity: The Rwanda Genocide and Beyond

Allan Thompson (ed.)

Waterloo, Ontario: Centre for International Governance Innovation (2019), pp. 453-482

"The Islamic State's media strategy allows for a message that has been crafted by a handful of IS propaganda agents to be disseminated by a few primary distributors, who in turn can reach thousands of unaffiliated sympathizers, and therefore millions of Twitter users. By means of a conclusion, this ... more

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Right-Wing Extremism on the Internet: 2018-2019 Report

Julian Bollhöfner Flemmimg Ipsen, Christina Seitz, Michael Wörner-Schappert

jugendschutz.net (2019), 27 pp.

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Islamism on the Internet: 2018 Report

Patrick Frankenberger, Ingrid Hofmann, Flemming Ipsen, Fehime Oezmen, Nava Zarabian

jugendschutz.net (2019), 23 pp.

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Islamist Content on Telegram: Children and Young People Lack Protection

jugendschutz.net (2019), 5 pp.

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Media in the Global Context: Applications and Interventions

Emmanuel K. Ngwainmbi (ed.)

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan (2019), xxii, 272 pp.

"This book investigates ways in which global media coverage of conflicts affects the worldviews of the social and cultural values of nationals from the war regions. It identifies the cultural patterns in remote communities that have been 'diluted' by IT and the extent to which the changes impacted t ... more

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Loving Hate: Anti-Muslim Extremism, Radical Islamism and the Spiral of Polarization

Maik Fielitz, Julia Ebner, Jakob Guhl, Matthias Quent

Jena (DE); London; Berlin: Institute for Democracy and Civil Society (IDZ); Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) (2018), 75 pp.

"This report focuses on the interactional dynamics between anti-Muslim extremists and radical Islamists in Germany and beyond. It reveals ideological underpinnings, approaches to mobilization and communication patterns, which all prove to be analogous on both sides, and it places emphasis on the rec ... iprocity of hate that may serve to intensify processes of individual and group radicalization. Our study presents the first systematic analysis of the interplay between both forms of extremism that plays out on different places on the Internet. It provides direct evidence showing that Islamist and far-right movements converge at different levels and mutually amplify one another. The analysis focuses on measuring the online interaction between extremist content, individuals and events. Overall, over 10,000 Islamist and far-right Facebook posts and over one million German anti-Muslim tweets between 1 January 2013 and 30 November 2017 were analyzed for this study. Additionally, we conducted three months of ethnographic research into encrypted pro-IS and pro-Al-Qaeda groups on Telegram as well as into far-right chat groups. Key Findings Radical Islamism and anti-Muslim racism, which manifest themselves in the form of far-right extremism and right-wing populism exhibit a symbiotic relationship. In the context of glocal interaction patterns, the far right operates as a national sphere of resonance for international jihadism. Both negate and dismantle basic democratic values such as the inviolability of human dignity and religious freedom. What’s more, racism against Muslims paves the way for radicalization through Islamic fundamentalists. We identified three key patterns that reveal common worldviews and argumentative resemblance: First, the demonization of enemies based on a clear distinction between friend and foe. Second, the victimization of one’s own group as both sides take advantage of the alleged discrimination of their own group and the constructed dominance of the other. Third, conspiracy, which is the basic explanation provided for why the respective milieus do not share their exclusionary claim to truth. The alleged systematic blindness caused by the Jews or fake news are needed to balance the dissonance between claims and reality as well as to contribute to demonizing other groups." (Executive summary) more

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The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators Online

Whitney Phillips

Data & Society Research Institute (2018), 128 pp.

"Part One, 'In Their Own Words: Trolling, Meme Culture, and Journalists’ Reflections on the 2016 US Presidential Election,' provides a historical overview of the relationship between the news media and far-right manipulators during the 2016 US presidential election. Part Two, 'At a Certain Point Y ... more

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Violent Extremism in Central Asia 2018: A Preliminary Survey of Groups, Digital Dimensions and State Responses

Ottawa; Bishkek: SecDev; Civil Initiative on Internet Policy (CIIP) (2018), 45 pp.

"Over the past decade, radicalisation to violent extremism (VE) has become a matter of pressing public and political concern in Central Asia. Between 2000 and 5000 Central Asians responded to calls to join jihad in Syria and Afghanistan, most of them radicalised while foreign workers in the labour c ... more

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Social Media in Africa: A Double-Edged Sword for Security and Development

Kate Cox, William Marcellino, Jacopo Bellasio, Antonia Ward, Katerina Galai, Sofia Meranto, Giacomo Persi Paoli

Cambridge: UNDP; RAND Europe (2018), xii, 80 pp.

"Social media is used by al-Shabaab, Boko Haram and ISIL in Africa. The importance of cross-media communications to the strategies of all three groups is underlined by the existence of dedicated branches for media planning, namely al-Shabaab’s al-Kata’ib, Boko Haram’s Media Office of West Afri ... more

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The Palgrave Handbook of Media and Communication Research in Africa
Top Insights

Bruce Mutsvairo (ed.)

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan (2018), xxix, 497 pp.

"This handbook attempts to fill the gap in empirical scholarship of media and communication research in Africa, from an Africanist perspective. The collection draws on expert knowledge of key media and communication scholars in Africa and the diaspora, offering a counter-narrative to existing Wester ... more

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Social Media Use Needs Assessment for At-Risk Groups & In-Depth Analysis of Use of Social Media in Indonesia

Ruici Tio, Fatima Astuti, Hannah Perry et al.

Search for Common Ground; Love Frankie (2018), 84 pp.

"This report summarizes the findings from a research study conducted by Love Frankie to inform Search for Common Ground (Search) in developing an implementation strategy for a 24-month project to reduce the influence of violent extremist narratives online, particularly targeted at youth and ex-juven ... more

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La fabrique audiovisuelle de l'Etat Islamique: La vidéo comme arme de guerre et outil de légitimation et de recrutement

Dhouha Rekik

Paris: L'Harmattan (2018), 134 pp.

"La propagande de guerre de l'EI adopte les codes des genres cinématographiques afin de fictionnaliser le fait guerrier et dissimuler l'fenvers du décors. Cette fantasmagorie surréaliste fonctionne selon un double regime de fascination et de stimulation des pulsions de mort qui ont pour effet de ... more

Media and Mass Atrocity: The Rwanda Genocide and Beyond Top Insights

The Palgrave Handbook of Media and Communication Research in Africa Top Insights

Media and Mass Atrocity: The Rwanda Genocide and Beyond
Top Insights

The Palgrave Handbook of Media and Communication Research in Africa
Top Insights