Smearing Sweden: International Influence Campaigns in the 2018 Swedish Election
This report presents the findings of a project that investigated foreign attempts to influence the 2018 Swedish elections online.
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Young Digital Leaders Impact Report
This report presents the findings from our Young Digital Leaders project which was designed to equip young people aged between 13-16 years old in Italy, Romania and Sweden with the skills they need to be safe, powerful and effective online citizens in the 21st century
Hassrede und Radikalisierung im Netz (Deutsch)
Hate Speech and Radicalisation in the Network, published by the Online Civil Courage Initiative (OCCI), a programme of ISD and Facebook, brings together a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives to explore the prevalence of hate speech on social media, the strategies and tactics of Islamist and far-right extremist groups online, the potential impact of disinformation on political polarisation and radicalisation, and how government, the private sector and civil society can respond to these challenges.
Hass Auf Knopfdruck (Deutsch)
This joint report by ISD and German campaign group, ‘Ich Bin Hier’, maps the rise and nature of far-right hate speech in Germany. It combines quantitative data-analysis from Facebook comment sections with insights gained from ethnographic research in far-right chat groups.
Hassliebe: Muslimfeindlichkeit, Islamismus Und Die Spirale Gesellschaftlicher Polarisierung (Deutsch)
'Loving Hate: anti-Muslim extremism, Islamism and the Spiral of Polarization' looks at reciprocal radicalisation between Islamists and far-right extremists and was published by ISD in cooperation with the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena.
“I Left to be Closer to Allah”: Learning about Foreign Fighters from Family and Friends
This report calls on data from the largest collection of interviews with foreign fighters and those closest to them. It combines data from open-ended interviews with 43 parents, siblings, and friends of 30 men and women who travelled to Syria and Iraq.
Digital Resilience: Stronger Citizens Online
This report presents the findings from our Digital Resilience pilot, which suggest that digital citizenship educational approaches can be an effective tool for increasing the resilience of young people to extremist grooming and exploitation online.
“Mainstreaming Mussolini” – How the Extreme Right Attempted to ‘Make Italy Great Again’ in the 2018 Italian Election
This briefing paper documents attempts by Italian extreme-right activists to influence the recent Italian elections in their favour. It highlights how these activists are adopting an increasingly international perspective, influencing and being influenced by the international alt-right, and adopting tactics similar to those deployed in recent European elections, including the German election.
Counter-Conversations: A model for direct engagement with individuals showing signs of radicalisation online
ISD’s Counter Conversations programme is an experimental approach designed to fill a gap in our response to online extremism by testing if the methods deployed in offline interventions can be brought into the social media domain.
Between Two Extremes: Responding to Islamist and tribalist messaging online in Kenya during the 2017 elections
This report reviews the state of extremist discourse and propaganda techniques used across the Kenyan social media landscape and share the results of a 16-month long study conducted to understand the capacity of Kenyan community service organisations (CSOs) to adapt to this changing landscape.