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| Europe | |
| Strengthening digital prevention against violent extremism in the European Union | |
| 2026-07-23 | |
| by María Cantó [OBSERVATORIOTERRORISMO] EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This project proposes a comprehensive investigation into contemporary processes of ideological radicalization in digital environments, focusing on how social media platforms, emerging technologies, and new cultural dynamics are shaping an ecosystem particularly conducive to the dissemination of extremist discourse. In recent years, online radicalization has moved beyond marginal spaces and expanded into everyday platforms, where emotional narratives, highly visual content, polarization strategies, and recruitment techniques targeting increasingly younger audiences are combined. This evolution demands a rigorous analysis that integrates both technological changes and the social and cultural transformations operating in the digital sphere. Among the most significant and worrying phenomena documented in this research is ideological hybridization: the convergence, feedback, and fusion of narratives originating from historically separate extremist movements that now operate through shared strategies, mutual appropriation of tactics, and the construction of common enemies that transcend traditional ideological divisions (International Observatory for Terrorism Studies, 2026). This hybridization process represents one of the most critical developments in contemporary extremism and constitutes a priority line of research on digital radicalization at the European and international levels. Hybridization manifests itself through multiple dynamics: the European far right adopts jihadist rhetoric about “purity” and “cultural invasion”; jihadism appropriates the aesthetics and communication tactics developed by white supremacists; incel communities fuse biological determinism with narratives of demographic “Great Replacement”; and identity movements construct frameworks that combine ethnic nationalism, radical antifeminism, antisemitic conspiracy theories, and violent rejection of sexual diversity. This phenomenon, termed “white jihad” by some specialists when describing a specific convergence between the far right and jihadism (Koch et al., 2023; Moreno, 2024), demonstrates that the traditional boundaries between extremist ideologies are rapidly blurring in a digital ecosystem where the transnational circulation of content, AI-powered automatic translation, and the viral logic of platforms facilitate cross-contamination that would be improbable in historical offline contexts.
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| Posted by:badanov |