The project has published peer reviewed articles in major journals alongside a co-edited collection and a co-authored monograph by university presses and policy recommendations. It has also disseminated research by engaging general public through open access multimedia outputs such as podcasts and media publications.
ONLINERPOL project has revealed the critical role of Internet media in fueling online extreme speech, and in forging connections between the diaspora and the homeland. These processes have facilitated further consolidation of Hindu majoritarian politics in contemporary India. At the same time, online media have provided opportunities of assembly and triggered dilemmas of ethical practice among minoritized religious groups. Through media practices around archiving, fun, surveillance and piety, online media have reconfigured the spaces and contexts of religious politics in India and the diaspora.
The Indian diaspora members in Europe are actively participating in online discussions, leading to fissures between nationalist discourses and active resistance to religious majoritarianism through street protests in major cities (Jain 2022; Anderson & Longkumer 2018).
One of the key conceptual contributions relates to theorizing fun as a salient aspect of right-wing mobilization globally (Udupa 2019). The argument is that fun is a meta-practice that links interlinked practices of fact-checking, abuse, assembly and aggression among online volunteers for right-wing movements. Fun not only normalizes extreme speech but also makes it enjoyable in globally shared online cultures.
The project has also shown that organized Muslim groups in India engage social media with great interest. Jama’at-i-Islami Hind (JIH), a reformist Islamist group in India, for instance, has developed an ethical code for social media use (Kramer 2020).
Such variations mark the contours of what the project defines as “millennial India” (Udupa, Venkatraman & Khan 2019). The project has shown that a politics of civic action has grown simultaneously with violent vigilante action fueled by rumors and hateful expressions circulating on social media platforms such as WhatsApp.
The project has also examined the global phenomenon of vitriolic exchange enabled by the Internet and developed the theory of “extreme speech” (Udupa & Pohjonen 2019; Udupa, Gagliardone & Hervik 2021).
Based on inquiries into extreme speech and global digital media, the project has proposed a set of action items for the United Nations in commissioned research paper (Udupa 2019). It has proposed four priority areas for UN entities: tackling global unevenness in platform governance; connecting critical communities such as factcheckers and anti-hate groups on a global scale; monitoring ‘gray’ zones, fringe actors, and smaller/domestic platforms; engaging repressive states to tackle coordinated disinformation and hate campaigns.
In a major intervention in ongoing debates surrounding artificial intelligence, hate speech and content moderation, the project has developed the framework of “ethical scaling”. Highlighting severe shortcomings in the content moderation practices of big tech, this work has developed procedural guidelines to involve communities, AI developers and ethnographers to collaboratively identify and label contentious expressions online (Udupa, Maronikolakis, Schuetze & Wisiorek 2022).
