a report by the Home Affairs Committee, published 31 January 2012.

Primarily focussed on “terror threats” and radical Islam. Doesn’t talk much about other hate groups.

Bottom line (for Untangling the Web’s Hate chapter purposes): the internet is blamed by many, but there’s not a lot of evidence to support this. convictions have gone down since 2006/7. antagonism needs an opposite, so although offline activity appears to be down, there’s an increase in online rhetoric.

a report for the Carnegie foundation by @josholalia & @ritajking, from February 2009.

The Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds project specifically endeavored to consider how the Internet can lead to a greater firsthand understanding of Islam for policymakers, diplomats, and people worldwide, and to explore how the Internet allows people to experience the culture of Islam in a manner conducive to substantive dialog between cultures.

We recommend expansion and empowerment of digital diplomacy efforts, and augmentation of exchange programs by adding a virtual component.

a report by the Media Standards Trust

Here’s the blurb:

In parts of the British press foreign coverage has fallen by almost 40% since 1979, now making up only just over a tenth of stories in the paper. In an increasingly globalised world how can this decline be explained? Does it matter? Is a new foreign news ecology emerging?

This report, the first of its kind on foreign reporting in the UK press, analyses how coverage of the world had changed over the last 30 years in four UK national newspapers, and explores what implications this has for how we get our foreign news in the future.

from Pew Internet & American Life’s Online Health Search 2006 (by Susannah Fox).

introduction

We asked respondents to think about the last time they went online for health or medical information, hoping to capture a portrait of a typical health search. As in past surveys, the typical online health information session is often undertaken on behalf of someone else, starts at a search engine, includes multiple sites, and has a minor impact on the person’s health care routine or the way they care for someone else.

from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, Nov 2009.

my notes:

This report makes leaps and bounds with regards to providing evidence against a (in)famous research study from 1998 (pdf) that suggested that the internet was socially isolating.

Also talks at great length about the diversity of interaction due to a wider array of non-family members in social networks.

A September 2010 report released by Quilliam, a counter-terrorism think tank that uses the Web to extract radicalised youth from jihadist online communities.

The report focusses on the ideological content on jihadist websites, “to show how pro-jihadist individuals interact on the sites’ forums in order to share religiously-framed justifications for violence, to organize a response to criticism of al-Qaeda and to plan outreach efforts in order to recruit others to violent extremism” (says the press release).

There are sections in the report on “cyber proselytizing” and conversational trends (read: content analysis). Evocative and enlightening, and relevant to cyber-hate practices beyond Jihadist forums.

some notes.

creating the internet bubble (encouraging an echo chamber of fiercely regulated and consistent beliefs) - NOTE: emphasis is added by me

“The self-sufficient Jihadist bubble that consequently exists within these sites not only serves as a safe space for like-minded Jihadist interaction, but also serves to safeguard Internet Jihadists against what they see as the many unsavoury or hostile aspects of the Internet, such as anti-Jihadist counter-messaging and news of physical Jihadist defeats on the battlefield.”

“Threads containing comments which could be perceived to be negative are swiftly removed and repeating offenders usually have their membership revoked.”

“This ‘virtual bubble’ nonetheless excludes other understandings of Islam, and Islamist ideology combined with the Wahhabi understanding of Islam, reinforces the idea of both a transnational Muslim Ummah and the idea that the only true understanding of Islam is the narrow Jihadist interpretation.”

on non-jihadist sites, extremists make overtly emotional appeals, using video, audio or imagery to convince potential recruits to join the more extreme “bubble”.