10th Anniversary of STR's Annual Postgraduate Conference: Current Themes in the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence

Session

Digital Extremism: Mobilisation, Prediction, and Prevention

1A

29 May 2026, 09:30

4.08 (Williamson Building)

30. “I’m Right, Not Far-Right”: Feminine Aesthetics and Pro-British Branding in GenAI Amelia Content

Allysa Czerwinsky (University of Manchester)

29/05/2026, 09:30

Paper

Generative AI has transformed how political and extremist groups create visual content online, with significant implications for disinformation, radicalisation, and online harms. The British far-right’s co-opting of Amelia, a fictional character in Shout Out UK’s anti-extremism game Pathways, serves as an important case study in demonstrating the shifting visual aesthetics used in far-right...

25. Forecasting Extremism Behavioural Change Using AI in Extremist Online Networks

James Stevenson (University of Bristol)

29/05/2026, 09:45

Paper

Online environments have become key spaces for the development and expression of extremist and cyber terrorism activity. Understanding how psychological drivers, behaviours, and group dynamics manifest in these spaces remains a significant challenge. Traditional approaches rely on manual qualitative analysis, which is resource intensive and often exposes researchers to bias, fatigue, and...

12. Combatting Online Extremism: The Algorithmic Amplification of Counter-Speech

Ellie Rogers

29/05/2026, 10:00

Paper

Violent extremists use social media to share content, which can be algorithmically amplified in certain contexts. One countering violent extremism (CVE) strategy aiming to address this problem is algorithmically amplifying counter-speech to target audiences. Examples include Redirection, automatically generating counter-speech and hashtag campaigns. However, there is limited research on the...