Sunday, July 22, 2018: 5:00 pm (Vaughan): Online communities have become a popular recruitment platform for alt-right and other extremist groups. While there is no standard playbook for alt-right recruitment, some major themes emerge, including recruiting on Discord servers, Reddit boards, Chan boards, and other platforms. Effectively, there is a web of overlap linking these disparate sites under the umbrella of the larger alt-right ideology and ethos. This talk is part how-to and part explanatory on research conducted by the speakers. It will cover some of the technical and ethnographic methods that are being used by researchers, activists, journalists, and others to monitor the evolving ecosystem, ideologies, tools, and tactics of the alt-right. The discussion will include some of the tooling that developed to monitor the alt-right and their online communities: both online and off. Also included will be coverage of the analysis that was performed alongside Unicorn Riot on analyzing thousands of leaked Discourse chats, as well as a dictionary of alt-right terms and memes that Caroline has been assembling from her research. Finally, the talk will focus on future concerns for the Internet, including safety, censorship, etc.

Caroline Sinders, Freddy Martinez