How Jihadi Salafists Sometimes Breach, But Mostly Circumvent, Facebook’s Community Standards in Crisis, Identity and Solution Frames

Abstract

We analyzed posts written by Facebook profiles who advocate violent jihad without supporting any terrorist group. They share extremist content in the middle of regular posts, thanks to which they are likely to reach a large audience. We identified to what extent their ingroup-outgroup opposition is constructed in crisis, identity, and solution frames and how they use these frames in posts which sometimes breach Facebook’s community standards, but which mostly circumvent them through various strategies of doublespeak. Among them, myth, in the sense of Barthes, and eudaimonic content appeared as particularly powerful to naturalize and spread jihadi ideology on social media.