Research Desk: Trauma-Related Effects of Terrorist Propaganda on Researchers, and Extremism on Telegram in Brazil

Research on the Radical Right: Understanding trauma-related effects of terrorist propaganda on researchers, and violent and non-violent extremism and online terrorism on Telegram in Brazil.

Highlights from recently published research and studies of the Radical Right: Understanding trauma-related effects of terrorist propaganda on researchers, and a report on violent and non-violent extremism and online terrorism on Telegram in Brazil.

Organizational Research

• Understanding the Trauma-Related Effects of Terrorist Propaganda on Researchers, By Miron Lakomy and Maciej Bożek, Global Network on Extremism & Technology (GNET)

  • “Researchers who study online terrorism and political violence face a broad spectrum of risks to their safety and wellbeing. Awareness of the challenges researchers face in this subdiscipline has remained relatively low for years. Since the launch of Islamic State’s propaganda campaign on the internet, which skilfully deployed scenes of death and dying to influence online audiences, that awareness has increased. Subsequently, some researchers have reported that prolonged exposure to terrorist content can be harmful across many wellbeing dimensions.”

• Extremism in the Ranks and After, By Michael Jensen, Sheehan Kane, and Elena Akers, National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) (University of Maryland)

  • “This research brief, which explores data from the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) project, is intended to help in this effort by providing information on the military service backgrounds of individuals who committed extremist crimes in the U.S. from 1990 through the first quarter of 2023. The data used in this research brief are from an ongoing project to expand the PIRUS database with supplemental information on the military backgrounds of U.S. extremists. This brief provides data on the rates of military service among U.S. extremists, as well as their branch, ideological, and extremist group affiliations.”

  • Radicalization in the Ranks: The Military Backgrounds of the January 6 Capitol Defendants (Written testimony of: Dr. Michael A. Jensen)

• Hate in the Golden State: Extremism & Antisemitism in California 2021-2022, Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Center on Extremism

  • “Over the past two years, California has dealt with a significant increase in extremist activity driven by a variety of factors, including increased collaboration between small white supremacist and antisemitic networks, as well as continued activity by extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and Rise Above Movement, particularly as they turned their attention toward the LGBTQ+ community. The state is home to the country’s highest number of extremist-related murders and plots and has seen numerous incidents of political violence. California has also seen a significant increase in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, becoming the state with the country’s second-highest number of antisemitic incidents at a time when ADL tracked the highest-ever number of antisemitic incidents nationwide.”

• Toxic Twitter: How Twitter Makes Millions from Anti-LGBTQ+ Rhetoric, Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH)

  • “Over the past year, the LGBTQ+ community has become the target of a wave of abuse centered around the false and hateful lie that they ‘groom’ children. The volume of this narrative on Twitter has only grown under Elon Musk, with tweets and retweets mentioning the LGBTQ+ community alongside ‘grooming’ slurs jumping 119% since his takeover of the platform on 27 October 2022. Often targeting educators, pride events, or drag story hour events, the ‘grooming’ narrative demonizes the LGBTQ+ community with hateful tropes, using slurs like ‘groomer’ and ‘pedophile’. The Center for Countering Digital Hate has identified over 1.7 million tweets and retweets since the start of 2022 that mention the LGBTQ+ community via a keyword such as ‘LGBT’, ‘gay’, ‘homosexual’ or ‘trans’ alongside slurs including ‘groomer’, ‘predator’ and ‘pedophile’.”