Transformation of terrorist and extremist strategies on the Internet (February-April 2022)

The Internet provides ample opportunities for spreading radical ideas and influencing public opinion. The study of information strategies of extremist and terrorist movements and the development of effective countermanipulative mechanisms for society are among the most important scientific problems of our time. The authors, using content analysis and comparative analysis, investigated the information strategy of radicals on the Internet in relation to the conducting of a special military operation of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation on the territory of a neighboring state in 2022. Two hundred Internet materials with signs of propaganda of terrorist and extremist ideas were identified during observations in February-April 2022. They became the basis for conducting content analysis on 11 signs and for constructing matrices. Topics of religious extremism, neo-fascism and nationalism predominate in the array of materials under consideration. The preferred style of writing extremist texts is informational (the author, as it were, informs the reader of some kind of " news," while using the actual informational occasion only in a small proportion of publications). The data obtained were compared with the results and information strategies of radicals obtained during a study in 2020 (widespread quarantine measures due to the spread of COVID-19). Similar and different features of the transformation of information strategies of extremists on the Internet were found. Typical features of both periods of crisis are the widespread dissemination of extremist materials, the growth in the number of aggressive comments in relation to state institutions and individual nationalities. The key difference was the sharp increase in the volume of Russophobic texts, the formation of enclaves of extremist communities outside social networks - based on neutral sites (electronic libraries, for example). The content analysis has shown an expansion of aggressive practices among older (40+) people, a formation of a distorted reality through special platforms in such a way that an alternative point of view is excluded from the information agenda of Runet.