Video Archive – The Conference by Media Evolution

Q&A - Extremist communication

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 10:34:04 GMT

Q&A with Michael Krona (Malmö University) & Maura Conway (Dublin City University)

Moderator: Anders Mildner

Maura Conway - Extremist communication

Tue, 16 Aug 2016 22:09:28 GMT

”There are a lot more women becoming involved in the right wing online scene at the present time”

Maura Conway, associate professor at Dublin City University, explains the ways in which extreme right movements utilize the internet to spread their ideological philosophies and set their actions in movement, trying to achieve the aims of their agenda.

We often tend to lump different kind of extreme right groups together, even though they can look very different. One key characteristic though, that they tend to have in common, is a core that aims at making fundamental changes to democratic systems and a concept of supremacism, with certain people being superior to all other and a hostility towards immigrants. Their methods on the internet consists of coding by colors, visual expressions and linguistics. The communication by these codes are supposed to maintain the already established extreme right communities which also extend in the more general parts of the internet with the objective to gain more sympathizers.

The areas of the internet where this communication is taking place have shifted over time from websites to forums, among them big communication platforms like Reddit and 4chan. A widespread perception among the general public is that extreme groups going online is something rather new. But ever since the earliest days of mainstream usage of internet a whole range of groups have turned to it for similar purposes as extreme right movements at the present day.

Maura stresses the need to ask bigger questions in order to prevent this from expanding even further which indicates not to solely focus on the technologies themselves but also on people and behavior patterns. How significant was the internet in terms of the radicalization process of these people and what content had the most profound effect?

Michael Krona - Extremist communication

Tue, 16 Aug 2016 15:26:15 GMT

”The Islamic State are more pragmatic than previous groups”

Extremist Groups are growing. Terror attacks are taking place all over the world, spreading a fear that is changing our society. Extremist groups have proven the effectivity and success of their marketing and recruitment techniques many times over, using tools that we know well.

Michael Krona, Senior lecturer and researcher at Malmö University, has spent the last two years researching the propaganda of the terror organization ISIS. He explains the two main stories being told by ISIS through their propaganda; the story of a well functioning, harmonic caliphate, depicting peaceful social life and playing children, and the heroism of being a fighter, glorifying the role of the militant soldier. The narration of extreme violence that our mainstream media channels frequently report about is only 3 % of the propaganda ISIS is transmitting online.

In order to counter this type of propaganda, he argues that more interdisciplinary research is needed and that a deeper understanding of the people being affected by the propaganda is key.