Tangled Web: The Interconnected Online Landscape of Hate Speech, Extremism, Terrorism and Harmful Conspiracy Movements in the UK

Published: 19 September 2023

Authors: Milo Comerford, Jacob Davey, Jakob Guhl and Carl Miller

As Ofcom prepared for its duties as the UK’s incoming social media regulator, they commissioned ISD to produce two reports to better understand the risk of UK users encountering online terrorist, incitement to violence and hate content across a range of digital services.

This report provides a snapshot of the online landscape of terrorism, extremism and hate speech related to the United Kingdom, and is the result of digital analysis conducted by ISD for Ofcom. It illustrates trends relating to a range of actors promoting terrorism, extremism, hate speech and harmful conspiracy theories across several relevant social media platforms with broadly comparable data access. These are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Telegram and 4chan. ISD researchers employed both qualitative and quantitative methodologies to produce this research, which is underpinned by a unique data analysis system called Beam, which uses machine learning and natural language processing for innovative cross-platform social media research.

You can find Ofcom’s foreword to the report, as well as its accompanying paper on the online landscape of terrorism, extremism and hate speech related to the United Kingdom, on their website.