“It is a racial war:” Analyzing the violent rhetoric of active club members on X - Institute for Strategic Dialogue

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

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...

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.

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.

ICE violence against women is largely untracked. One advocacy group is working to change that.

Immigration agents with prior records of sexual and gender-based violence have drawn attention in Trump’s second term amid questions about training and vetting.

Musk’s AI Grok bot rants about ‘white genocide’ in South Africa in unrelated chats

X chatbot tells users it was ‘instructed by my creators’ to accept ‘white genocide as real and racially motivated’

When Riot Cops Are Not Enough

In When Riot Cops Are Not Enough, sociologist Mike King examines the policing, and broader political repression, of the Occupy Oakland movement. King’s active and daily participation in that movement provides a unique insider perspective to illustrate how the Oakland police and city administrators lost the ability to effectively control the movement.    

AI-powered online abuse: How AI is amplifying violence against women and what can stop it | UN Women – Headquarters

AI is turning online spaces into new frontiers of abuse. Feminist and tech experts, Laura Bates and Paola Gálvez-Callirgos, explain how it happens and how we fight back.

The Case for User Agent Extremism - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.