National Research Project Phase 2

This project delivers a scoping review and comparative policy analysis examining what youth bystander approaches work in relation to violent extremism and disinformation.

Conducted by a multidisciplinary team of researchers across the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University, Aston University, and Leiden University, the project responds to the growing prominence of adolescents and young adults in the violent extremist landscape, particularly in online environments characterised by algorithmic amplification and identity formation driven by peers.

The scoping review synthesised international evidence on youth bystander intervention programs, finding that while such programs have been rigorously tested in adjacent domains including sexual violence, bullying, and dating violence, they have scarcely been applied to violent extremism and disinformation contexts. The project advances a framework of conditional transferability, whereby the underlying behavioural mechanisms of effective bystander programs (including peer network diffusion, norm correction, ambiguity reduction, and reinforcement) are robust and independent of context, but substantive adaptation is required given the structural differences of violent extremism. The comparative policy analysis mapped youth bystander approaches across Australia, Canada, and the European Union, identifying key programmatic gaps and governance considerations relevant to the Australian context. Supplementing both analyses, a Southport case study examined how disinformation fuelled riots following a July 2024 attack. This illustrated how online disinformation and physical mobilisation can converge within days through networked social processes – processes that carefully designed bystander programs are specifically intended to disrupt.

Drawing on these three strands of evidence, the project makes recommendations across strategic, programmatic, and operational domains, including formalising youth as active prevention agents within national P/CVE strategy, integrating digital literacy and CVE programming under a unified prevention framework, and developing platform-specific digital intervention toolkits for young people.