Blog

By Alastair Reed, Anne Craanen, and Arthur Bradley In the digital age, the aftermath of terrorist attacks is often captured and disseminated not only by the perpetrators, but also by bystanders. Mobile phone videos, CCTV footage, body cam recordings, and livestreams routinely surface online within moments of such events. While this bystander content is not ...

By Nicola Mathieson, Audrey Gagnon, and Ashton Kingdon In June 2025, C-REX and VOX-Pol hosted the second edition of the PhD Summer School ‘Studying Online Far-Right Extremism: Methods, Personal Safety, and Ethics’, organised by Audrey Gagnon (University of Ottawa) and Nicola Mathieson (University of Liverpool).  In addition to lectures on qualitative and quantitative approaches to ...

Welcome to Volume 12, Issue 9 of the monthly VOX-Pol Newsletter. UPCOMING VOX-Pol PUBLICATION A new VOX-Pol report will be launched in a few weeks time, titled Researching the Far Right Safely in Academia: Current Practices and Constraints by Antonia Vaughan. The launch date and online event will be announced soon! Dr. Antonia Vaughan recently completed a PhD in Politics, Languages ...

By Audrey Gagnon and Nicola Mathieson The Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) and VOX-Pol recently hosted a PhD Summer School on Studying Online Far-Right Extremism. The Summer School, which took place at the University of Oslo from June 9-13, was organized by Audrey Gagnon (University of Ottawa) and Nicola Mathieson (University of Liverpool). It ...

Is your research related to online extremism and/or terrorism? Would you like to share some of your findings or reflections with an audience, including other researchers, policymakers, law enforcement, social media company representatives, and others, with similar interests? If so, how about contributing to the VOX-Pol Blog? We will publish your contribution and communicate it to ...

The VOX-Pol Blog publishes weekly on a Wednesday, and takes a break in August, when we share the most-read post of the year. This year, VOX-Pol has published a total of 48 posts. Over ten of these articles were on the topic of ‘incels’ and ‘online misogyny’. ‘Young people’ were the primary focus of five ...

Welcome to Volume 12, Issue 8 of the monthly VOX-Pol Newsletter. NEW PUBLICATION We are pleased to share a new report from Human Digital and VOX-Pol, titled, ‘Gore & Violent Extremism: An explorative analysis of the use of gore websites for hosting and sharing extremist and terrorist content’.  The report was launched at an online event. ...

By Ninian Frenguelli It is increasingly difficult to access data from social media platforms. Researcher access to Meta platforms was removed in 2024 when CrowdTangle was shut down, but it was already being slowly restricted prior to this with Meta closing accounts of researchers in 2021. Researchers are in a difficult position: with no official ...

By Mark Peden Troubling trends in violent extremism are emerging that challenge traditional frameworks of classification and ideology. Amid accelerating digital revolution, ongoing permacrisis, and increasingly apocalyptic media narratives, nihilistic and apocalyptic violent extremism (N/AVE) is on the rise, frequently driven by mixed, unclear, and unstable (MUU) belief systems that defy conventional categorisation. Beyond ideological ...

By Alice Sibley and Joshua Bowes As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly integrated and embedded into social media platforms, wariness around its harmful exploitation has grown. As previous research has shown, malignant actors, ranging from misogynistic online users to extremists, have exploited AI to spread harmful conspiracy theories, share racist images and disseminate disinformation. Generative ...