Domestic Extremism in Europe - Athena Institute

ism, Maoism or Anarchism for instance; i.e. there is a
much wider array or groups in the latter category.
In our modern times the use of the internet is also a very
important factor. The massive changes is mass communi-
cation in the past decade and the social media boom in
the last five years or so have had a huge effect on the way
these groups spread their propaganda and organize
themselves. The Institute’s findings show that a whopping
86 per cent of groups use the internet in some way
(have their own sites, blogs, forums, Twitter accounts,
Facebook pages or YouTube accounts, etc.).
Modern means of communication and other factors such
as the activities of authorities have also had an effect on
the organizational structure of domestic extremist
groups. A completely separate chapter will be dedicated
to organizational structure later in this paper; however it
has to be noted here that horizontally organized leader-
less resistance- and cell-based groups are on the rise.
Only 37 per cent of the groups have a strictly hierarchical
structure, whilst 48 per cent of groups use leaderless re-
sistance or a cell-based structure. It is also very interesting
that from this 48 per cent, 10 per cent can be classified
as pseudo cells that are even more loosely organized than
leaderless resistance groups.
Domestic Extremism in Europe - Threat Landscape 25