Blog

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 Brigitte Naderer & Carina Pleier In late 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice initiated a series of document releases under the provisions of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The initial release, which took place on 19 December 2025, encompassed a substantial volume of documentation, amounting to over 100,000 pages. This release included a wide ...

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 Christopher V. David and Marten Risius Extremist groups operate in an environment where trust is existential and suspicion is constant—every new member could be an ally or an informant. The Provisional IRA, for example, famously operated a dedicated squad tasked with tracking down and liquidating informers within their ranks. Though in a spectacular twist, ...

By Ellie Rogers As technology has developed, extremist actors have found new ways to use it to their advantage. Large language models (LLMs) are one area that has been exploited by extremists to create and share content. Introduction LLMs use natural language processing (NLP), and often artificial intelligence (AI), to process and generate text for ...

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 Joshua Farrell-Molloy Only a decade ago, Ireland’s far right was barely visible. Its current form is rooted in 1990s anti-abortion activism, which shaped the political careers of figures Justin Barrett and James Reynolds, who in 2016 co-founded the National Party, Ireland’s largest far-right party. The 2018 abortion referendum provided an early incubation space for ...