Teaching and confronting digital extremism: contexts, challenges and opportunities

摘要

Purpose - This 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/approach - This 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.Findings - Educators 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 strategics 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/value - This paper's added values are the insights and practical recommendations for undergraduate educators teaching on a topic of urgent contemporary concern: digital extremism.