Beschreibung:
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<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Purpose</jats:title>
<jats:p>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.</jats:p>
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<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Design/methodology/approach</jats:title>
<jats:p>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.</jats:p>
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<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Findings</jats:title>
<jats:p>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 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.</jats:p>
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<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Originality/value</jats:title>
<jats:p>This paper’s added values are the insights and practical recommendations for undergraduate educators teaching on a topic of urgent contemporary concern: digital extremism.</jats:p>
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