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How do right-wing extremist organizations throughout the world use the Internet as a tool for communication and recruitment? What is its role in identity-building within radical right-wing groups and how do they use the Internet to set their agenda, build contacts, spread their ideology and encourage mobilization? This important contribution to the field of Internet politics adopts a social movement perspective to address and examine these important questions. Conducting a comparative content analysis of more than 500 extreme right organizational web sites from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, it offers an overview of the Internet communication activities of these groups and systematically maps and analyses the links and structure of the virtual communities of the extreme right. Based on reports from the daily press the book presents a protest event analysis of right wing groups' mobilisation and action strategies, relating them to their online practices. In doing so it exposes the new challenges and opportunities the Internet presents to the groups themselves and the societies in which they exist.

This article investigates the potential role of the Internet for Spanish extremist right--wing organizations for their contacts (at the national as well as at the international level), the promotion of a collective identity and their mobilization. To address this issue, it employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative research techniques. A social network analysis, based on online links between about 90 Spanish extreme right organizations, aims to investigate the organizational (online) structure of the right-wing Spanish milieu, and a content analysis of right wing web sites to grasp the degree and forms of their Internet's usage for various goals. The analysis focuses on different types of Spanish extreme right organizations (from political parties to skinhead and cultural groups). The results are interpreted against the off line political and cultural setting of opportunities and constraints offered by the country. O artigo investiga o papel potencial da internet para as organizações espanholas de extrema-direita, tendo em vista estabelecimento de contactos (a nivel nacional e internacional), a promoção da identidade colectiva e a mobilização. Para analisar este tema, o artigo combina a metodologia qualitativa e quantitativa. A análise das redes sociais, baseada nas ligações online de cerca de 90 organizações espanholas de extrema--direita, tem o intuito de analisar a estrutura organizacional (online) da extrema-direita espanhola e o conteúdo dos sítios na internet para compreender o grau e a forma da utilização deste canal para alcançar os seus objectivos. A análise debmça-se sobre diferentes tipos de organizações espanholas de extrema-direita (desde os partidos políticos aos skinheads, passando pelos grupos culturais). Os resultados foram interpretados em confronto com as oportunidades e limitações off line do cenário político e cultural do país.

Over the last decade, many Western democracies have experienced a dramatic rise in extreme right political parties and movements. Furthermore, profound changes have been observed in the mobilization ability of these political forces in terms of their ideology, discourse, organizational structures and action strategies (Marchi et al. 2011). Also notable has been the increase in their use of the Internet to do politics by other means (Karmasyn et al. 2000; Mininni 2002). Indeed, while formerly on the political fringes, extreme right parties now have significant political weight in several national Parliaments (e.g., Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Hungary, the Netherlands and Sweden, etc.), as well as at the EU level. The growth of these actors over the past decade has been mirrored online.

Throughout the world, the usage of the Internet by extremist groups is on the rise. Analyses reveal that today, almost without exception, all major (and many minor) extremist and insurgent groups have websites (Zanini and Edwards 2001: 43). According to Weimann (2006a) there are some 4,800 terrorist or terrorist-related websites that currently exist. Arab and Islamic groups are regarded as having the largest presence on the Internet, but others, such as right-wing extremists, are also active participants on the Web (Whine 2000).

This chapter looks at political mobilization in the selected countries, discussing their potential impact on right-wing activism online and offline. The norm of the German Penal Code forbidding the production and diffusion of material inciting hatred against parts of the population or against a national, racial, religious or ethnic group, has been recently extended to the Internet. In Italy, in contrast to what happened in other European countries, where right-wing extremist parties remained a fringe phenomenon with little electoral potential until the mid-1960s, the extreme right was soon, not long after the end of World War II, re-integrated into the political system. In the United States, the electoral system has always strongly penalized minor political parties and therefore the chance for the far right to have representation in institutions. Public opinion surveys conducted in Europe and in the United States show varying levels of trust in parliamentary institutions and political parties across the six countries.

This chapter illustrates the specific functions of right-wing websites for several aspects related to political activism on the Net. There are some variations between different types of extreme right groups, with youth sub cultural and neo-Nazi organizations most frequently using multimedia material. Italian extreme right groups are particularly interested in showing their popularity, whereas the German and English ones are those more attentive in facilitating the usability of their websites. According to the data extreme right organizations make use, although still moderately when compared to other functions, of the Internet for mobilizing, and, most interestingly, this mobilization effort takes several forms on their websites. The Internet is thus periodically used by right-wing organizations to help mobilization around local and national offline political campaigns. In the conclusion, cross-country differences and similarities will be underlined and linked to the offline opportunities of the political, cultural and technological context of the extreme right in the six democracies.

This chapter presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book proposes an analysis of the extreme right political activism with the Internet using a theoretical framework combining insights from research on political mobilization and social movements, on the one hand, and media and political communications research, on the other. It enters into this debate by investigating an object of study thus far rarely explored in the literature on civil society organizations and information communication technologies (ICT): the use of the Web by radical organizations. The book investigates to what extent the different structural configurations of the extreme right that emerged in the different countries are reflected in differences in the strategic use of the Internet by right-wing organizations. It looks at the degree and forms of the recent evolution of the right-wing mobilization out of the Web and its characteristics,.

This chapter analyzes the organizational and potential mobilizational structure of the online communities of the European and American extreme right, delving into the structural properties of connections among these extreme right groups. By applying a social network analysis to the online contacts between organizations, our goal is to explore the organizational structure of the extreme right, reflecting on specific actors' visibility, configurations of power, as well as alliances and potential conflicts between these groups. The American network appears even more fragmented and dispersed than the Italian and British ones, with many isolated organizations. Political parties have higher betweenness in the United Kingdom than elsewhere, where instead they appear as lacking intermediation power. The Italian and British extreme right networks appear to be very fragmented, highly diversified and difficult to coordinate, whereas the German network is denser and much more concentrated on a few central actors.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on key concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book possesses an important advantage for right-wing political parties and movements, as for any other collective actor: it does not cost much and it connects the followers. It illustrates the great potentialities of the online environment for radical right groups and shows that the Internet is used more for some political functions and less for others by such groups. Throughout the world, the usage of the Internet by extremist groups is on the rise. Through the Internet people can access to limitless news and information options, especially in the blogosphere, however, as argued, in a situation where partisan weblogs emerge as a significant political force, the relationship between democracy. On the one hand, for constitutionalists, regulation of hate speech violates the First Amendment and damages a free society.

This chapter analyzes the characteristics and trends of extreme right activities, at least those emerged from the analysis of newspapers, in the selected democracies. Several studies have shown that contextual dimensions alone are not sufficient to give a full account of the development and forms of right-wing mobilization, which are, instead, also tied to internal organizational factors. An interesting feature of right-wing extremism today concerns the scope of its mobilization, that is, the territorial dimension of extreme right events, actors and targets. Collective actors, however, can rely on a wide array of tactics, aimed at expressing their claims and influencing decision-makers or public opinion. NPD and neo-Nazi groups produce videos that look like TV news shows. While the NPD uses videos for election campaigns, other groups, such as the neo-Nazi project Volksfront-Medien, produce and present videos on their website to influence young people.