ISD research revealed that some members of US-based Active Clubs are using X accounts to call for violence against targeted communities.
Data Feminism for AI
Attacks on women and trans people are not happening in a vacuum. Communications scholars W. Lance Bennett and Marianne Kneuer recently argued that we are witnessing the intensification of "illiberal public spheres" around the world (Bennett and Kneuer, 2023). These are characterized by a set of anti-democratic communications tactics that include the denigration and exclusion of minoritized people, targeted attacks on the press and political institutions, and transgression of norms of civil discourse. Such tactics are enabled and amplified by the social media platforms owned by Big Tech, whose business model elevates attention above all other metrics, such that they profit richly off extremism, threats, spectacle, and lies. The success of this corporate partnership with right-wing extremism is evident in the proliferation of book bans (Magnusson, 2024), the demonization of DEI and critical race theory (Crenshaw, 2022), and mob tactics to doxx, intimidate, misrepresent, and otherwise silence people that study misinformation, speak out against racial and gender violence, or rule against insurrectionists (Edmonds, 2024). At the same time, we have seen the continued work of feminists, including Latin American, Indigenous, and abolitionist feminists in the US and globally, doing the work of imagining alternate worlds (Cullors, 2021; Davis, 2022; Ricaurte, 2019; Simpson, 2017). This paper represents our own first attempt to imagine a more equitable, sustainable, feminist world for AI research.
How Anti-LGBTQ+ Rhetoric Fuels Violence
Hate speech from the far right is increasing the risk of violence against LGBTQ+ people such as the Club Q shooting
The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State by Emmaia Gelman - Hardcover
Scholarship is a powerful tool for changing how people think, plan, and govern. By giving voice to bright minds and bold ideas, we seek to foster understanding and drive progressive change.
X's Algorithm Feeds Off Ragebait and Impacts Democrats More, Study Finds
X is driving engagement by making users fight in the replies.
Remotely Coerced Violence: 764, The Com Network, and the Hybridization of Threats - Combating Terrorism Center at West Point
Abstract: This article examines 764 and the wider Com Network as a case study in remotely coerced violence and the hybridization of contemporary terrorist and violent extremist threats. It argues that nihilistic violent extremism is best understood as a victim-driven, youth-centered online ecosystem in which status, belonging, and identity are earned through the production, circulation, … Continued
Building a Culture of (Digital) Safety
Black culture is in a lot of ways synonymous with how internet culture exists writ large. From what is now described as “Gen-Z slang” (or as Black people have always known it, AAVE) to our methods of organizing (Black feminists starting hashtag activism and creating movements like #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and #SayHerName) and even how we […]
Political Violence | The Paper Pilot
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology
Expert: The NAACP is Fighting to Keep Black Communities From Becoming AI’s Collateral Damage – The Root
These Dallas Residents Are on the Front Lines of Trump’s War Against “Antifa”
If convicted, people who showed up to a protest could face “decades of prison time,” the National Lawyers Guild says.
Frontiers | Cyber-mobbing, technology-facilitated abuse and online violence
This article collection will explore the pressing issues of cyber-mobbing, technology-facilitated abuse and online violence, including online abuse, stalking...
Reflecting On a Few Very, Very Strange Years In Silicon Valley's Rape Culture
On rape culture in Silicon Valley and its subcultures: Rationalism, Effective Altruism, TPOT, and Vibecamp. Also the informal rules that dictate how women are allowed to talk about sexual violence.
Leader-driven or Leaderless: How Participation Structure Sustains Engagement and Shapes Narratives in Online Hate Communities
Extremist communities increasingly rely on social media to sustain and amplify divisive discourse. However, the relationship between their internal participation structures, audience engagement, and narrative expression remains underexplored. This study analyzes ten years of Facebook activity by hate groups related to the Israel–Palestine conflict, focusing on anti-Semitic and Islamophobic ideologies. Consistent with prior work, we find that higher participation centralization in online hate groups is associated with greater user engagement across hate ideologies, suggesting the role of key actors in sustaining group activity over time. Meanwhile, our narrative frame detection models—based on an eight-frame extremist taxonomy (e.g., dehumanization, violence justification)—reveal a clear contrast across hate ideologies: centralized Islamophobic groups employ more uniform messaging, while centralized anti-Semitic groups demonstrate greater framing diversity and topical breadth, potentially reflecting distinct historical trajectories and leader coordination patterns. Analysis of the inter-group network indicates that, although centralization and homophily are not clearly linked, ideological distinctions emerge: Islamophobic groups cluster tightly, whereas anti-Semitic groups remain more evenly connected. Overall, these findings clarify how participation structure may shape the dissemination pattern and resonance of extremist narratives online and provide a foundation for tailored strategies to disrupt or mitigate such discourse.
We Are Civic Media
A discipline-crossing introduction to civic media via accounts from grassroots practitioners “Civic media” is the use of contemporary technologies to connect communities, inspire action, build civic capacity, and sustain social change efforts. Written by artists, creators, storytellers, organizers, and others working at the intersections of technology, social justice, and culture, this book summons civic media through the lived experiences of its contributors. Latoya Peterson delves into the therapeutic power of gaming; Akilah Hughes discusses identity and community through the lens of her campaign to change her high school's racist mascot; and Tyree Boyd-Pates emphasizes the potential power of museum curation to challenge power dynamics and bridge digital and physical realms. Through the experiences of these grassroots practitioners and many others, We Are Civic Media offers accessible insights for those interested in understanding, respecting, and practicing civic media.
Social cognition and interpersonal violence
Why do some people resort to violence while others in similar circumstances do not? Drawing on 99 in-depth interviews with men from high-violence Chicago neighborhoods who participated in a community violence intervention, we examine how past exposure to violence shapes the social cognitions that influence future involvement in violence—through the schemas and scripts people use to interpret social situations and guide behavior. We identify three specific social cognitions that respondents associated with violence: misconstruing ambiguous cues as threats, defaulting to a narrow set of behavioral responses, and attributing violent behavior to fixed personal traits rather than situational factors. Respondents reported that participation in the program’s cognitive behavioral component shifted these social cognitions in ways they associated with reduced violence involvement. The consistency of these self-reports combined with the program’s experimental impacts suggest the hypothesis that these specific social cognitions could play an important role in violence and may be modifiable through intervention.
The Pre-emption of Resistance: Occupy Oakland and the Evolution of State Power
Author(s): Behbehanian, Laleh | Advisor(s): Burawoy, Michael B | Abstract: This dissertation aims to contribute to our understanding of contemporary state strategies targeting social movements by examining the case of Occupy Oakland. Emphasizing how state strategies, both tactical and discursive, dynamically evolve through their iterative relation to movement strategies, it presents a detailed empirical account that is disaggregated into three “moments”, each of which are characterized by the predominance of a distinct state strategic repertoire. The objective is to highlight an underlying transformation through which the state’s strategies evolve from being highly reactive, indiscriminate and vulnerable to spectacularization to becoming increasingly pre-emptive, targeted and discursively buttressed.The first “moment” commences with the movement’s occupation of Oscar Grant Plaza. Faced with Occupy Oakland’s highly disruptive tactics and its firm rejection of any forms of negotiation or cooperation with City officials, the state resorts to a strategy of Naked Coercion (reactive, indiscriminate violence that is highly vulnerable to spectacularization) which backfires and results in an internationally televised disaster on the evening of October 25th. This creates an extraordinary window of opportunity for the movement, dramatically increasing public support and enabling it to undertake the first general strike in the U.S. since 1946. This fuels a process of adaptation as the struggle proceeds into the second “moment”, and the state shifts to a strategy of Targeted Repression that is increasingly pro-active, targeted and discursively buttressed so as to diminish the danger of its spectacularization. The new strategy succeeds in permanently dislodging the occupation of Oscar Grant Plaza, as well as criminalizing the tactic of occupation and excising it from movement’s repertoire. Still unsatisfied with the repression it had achieved, in the third and final “moment” the state introduces a strategy of Pre-emptive Neutralization that is pre-emptively oriented, targeted at high “risk” populations and discursively buttressed by powerful spectacles of “risk”. This enables a thorough incapacitation of the movement – fully neutralizing its potential for collective action by rendering Occupiers a target population that could no longer even publicly assemble without inciting highly militarized police responses that were now pre-emptively justified by the risk of “violence” they collectively posed.
