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  Extracts From ISD’s Submitted Response to the UK Government Online Harms White Paper

  On 8th April 2019, the UK Government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) released its much-anticipated Online Harms White Paper, setting out a range of proposed legislative and non-legislative measures to tackle online harms ranging from illegal (e.g. terrorist content) through to harmful but not necessarily illegal online behaviour.

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  An imprecise science: Assessing interventions for the prevention, disengagement and de-radicalisation of left and right-wing extremists

  This report examines intervention approaches currently being used to challenge political extremism globally, drawing on 19 interviews with practitioners based in Belgium, Canada, Germany, France, Sweden, the UK and USA.

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  Women, Girls and Islamist Extremism

  This new toolkit will help practitioners engage more confidently with women and girls affiliated with Islamist extremism and provide guidance for broader community groups involved in safeguarding at-risk women and girls in Europe. Building on a series of interviews with intervention providers, the new toolkit sheds light on some of the reasons why British women became affiliated with ISIS. The interviews have informed a new practical toolkit which includes recommendations, case studies and tools.

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Latest

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.

“Make Germany Great Again” – Kremlin, Alt-Right and International Influences in the 2017 German Elections

This report presents the findings of a project that investigated Kremlin and other foreign attempts to influence the 2017 German elections. The project uncovered the tactics and narratives employed by Kremlin-sponsored media, pro-Kremlin social media networks and the international alt right to distort political discourse during the election campaign period.

Internet Citizens – Impact Report

This report presents the evaluation of the the first phase of ISD’s Internet Citizens, which is designed to teach media literacy, critical thinking and digital citizenship, and to encourage young people to be positive voices online while increasing their resilience to hate and extremism.