Teaching and confronting digital extremism: contexts, challenges and opportunities

Abstract

PurposeThis paper aims to offer practical guidance on teaching about digital extremism – defined here as the intersection of digital disinformation campaigns with political extremism – by highlighting four pedagogical challenges: the danger of unintentionally “redpilling” students; the slippery slope to false equivalency and “bothsidesism” in turbulent partisan waters; the difficulty of separating empirical analyses from prescriptive debates circulating in popular media; and the trouble of getting students to understand digital extremism as a sociotechnical problem rather than as a social-or-technical problem. The conclusion proposes opportunities for educators to integrate practical approaches to confronting digital extremism with digital civics curricula.Design/methodology/approachThis paper reviews pedagogical challenges and outlines a curricular program for teaching about digital extremism drawn from the author’s experience designing undergraduate courses and open teaching modules between 2016 and 2021.FindingsEducators should shift focus from the substance of digital extremism to its tools – social media platforms’ surveillance and data-gathering methods, advertising technologies and monetized user-generated content, personalized recommendation algorithms and media manipulation strategies that amplify some narratives while suppressing others – and the media and political institutions that benefit most from it. Proposed lessons include: how digital extremists manipulate social media metadata; engagement with data creation and targeting practices; and analysis of information production, circulation and consumption exploring media manipulation tools and their effects.Originality/valueThis paper’s added values are the insights and practical recommendations for undergraduate educators teaching on a topic of urgent contemporary concern: digital extremism.