Blog

By Heidi Schulze, Brigitte Naderer, and Diana Rieger The VOX-Pol workshop “Borderline Content Online” can be viewed here Managing harmful online content remains one of the central challenges of the digital age. The advent of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, which can generate vast amounts of content quickly and with little effort, complicates this ...

By Joshua Farrell-Molloy On 26 April the UK became the first country in the world to proscribe the ‘Terrorgram Collective’. From today, membership, support, or the display of articles associated with the network is now illegal and can carry a punishment of up to 14 years in prison or an unlimited fine. The listing of Terrorgram represents a ...

By Ryan Scrivens For more on these findings and the nature of the study in general, see the full manuscript which was recently published open access in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. Despite the ongoing need for practitioners to identify violent right-wing extremists (RWEs) online before their engagement in violence offline, there is little empirical knowledge about their digital footprints in general ...

By Ursula Schmid, Heidi Schulze and Antonia Drexel Memes are an important part of social media communication, frequently associated with contemporary (pop)culture. Even though most people use memes for benign purposes, beneath the surface of seemingly innocent jokes lies a darker underbelly: there has been a substantial debate regarding the use of memes to spread ...

Welcome to Volume 11, Issue 6 of the monthly VOX-Pol Newsletter. VOX-Pol AT TASM The Terrorism and Social Media (TASM) conference takes place in the Great Hall on Swansea University’s Bay Campus on 18 and 19 June 2024. VOX-Pol is a co-organiser of the conference, please visit our stand and say hello! UPCOMING VOX-Pol WORKSHOP A ...

By Shannon Zimmerman Last Saturday, a man armed with a large knife entered the Westfield shopping centre at Bondi Junction in Sydney. He proceeded to attack over a dozen people before being killed by a policewoman. Video footage appears to show the attacker avoiding men and targeting women. Five of the six people killed in ...

VOX-Pol Member Professor Maura Conway presented at the ‘EU versus Crime‘ conference co-organised by Europol and the European Commission. This event kicked off of Europol’s 25th anniversary year. The festivities kicked off on 28 May at the EU versus Crime conference, co-organised by Europol and the European Commission. Europol’s Executive Director Catherine De Bolle and the ...

By Connor Rees The Seeing Eye to Eye: Developing Sustainable Multistakeholder Communities (SE2E) project was developed and funded through the 2022 Terrorism and Social Media (TASM) Conference sandpit event. The project aim is conducting empirical research into how various stakeholders view and experience multistakeholderism in countering terrorism and violent extremism online (TVE) as part of the larger ...

By Sam Jackson For more than a decade, we’ve been debating how to respond to hate speech – broadly understood as “offensive discourse targeting a group or an individual based on inherent characteristics (such as race, religion or gender).”1 The status quo in the United States holds that governments may not restrict speech outside of narrow exceptions (for ...

By Francisco Javier Saavedra Macías, Universidad de Sevilla In May 1097, during the siege of Nicaea, crusaders catapulted the severed heads of prisoners over the walls surrounding the city, with the aim of terrorising their enemy. The strategy worked. On June 19 of the year the crusaders captured the city. However, only those who lived ...