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Welcome to Volume 13, Issue 4 of the monthly VOX-Pol Newsletter. WORKSHOP ANNOUNCEMENT Political Theology and the Digital Caliphate: Jihadism in the Age of Globalisation11 June 2026, 10:00-17:00Avenue Campus (room: TBC),University of Southampton This workshop invites contributions that examine the relationship between globalisation and the revival of the caliphate in contemporary Islamist thought and activism. Moving ...

Welcome to Volume 13, Issue 3 of the monthly VOX-Pol Newsletter. The Only Way is Ethics: Next Gen Networks Unite The University of Southampton’s Centre for Criminology in the Digital Age is excited to convene an event dedicated to supporting the next generation of researchers working at the cutting edge of sensitive, ethically complex research. This ...

Welcome to Volume 13, Issue 2 of the monthly VOX-Pol Newsletter. A list of confirmed speakers and panels for this year’s TASM conference is now available! Co-organised by CYTREC and VOX-Pol, TASM 2026 will feature more than 70 presentations, delivered by speakers from around the world, as well as a wide variety of different panels, stakeholder-led workshops and the TASM sandpit. ...

Welcome to Volume 13, Issue 1 of the monthly VOX-Pol Newsletter. THE CATALYST PUBLIC POLICY CHAMPIONS PROGRAMME The Catalyst Public Policy Champions Programme is an intensive, international fully-funded executive-style training programme designed to strengthen policy responses to the growing links between online gender-based violence and violent extremism. Led by the Christchurch Call Foundation, and delivered by the Hertie School in ...

By Sean McCafferty In recent years there has been suggestion of a tech backslide by major social media platforms, leading to a reduction in proactive content moderation. This has become a significant concern for scholars of online terrorism. This blog post examines a sample of empirical data from Facebook that suggests there is a resurgence ...

By Nauval El Ghifari Extremism in the Age of Short Form Content Over the past decade, online extremism has not disappeared so much as it has changed form. Earlier expressions were concentrated on closed forums and ideological websites; contemporary ones increasingly surface within mainstream social media. What has shifted is not the presence of extremist ...

By Joshua Skoczylis and John Babalola The question is no longer whether social media platforms influence politics. They do. The question is whether democratic life can endure when the central infrastructure of public communication is engineered to reward extremism, disinformation, and division — and when its owners are increasingly invested in this outcome. The far ...

By Brigitte Naderer & Carina Pleier In late 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice initiated a series of document releases under the provisions of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The initial release, which took place on 19 December 2025, encompassed a substantial volume of documentation, amounting to over 100,000 pages. This release included a wide ...

By Sam David UpScrolled, a social media platform for microblogging and short-form video sharing, experienced rapid growth in late January 2026 following disputes surrounding TikTok’s US operations. The expansion was initiated largely by allegations that protest-related content was being suppressed on mainstream platforms and, while independent verification of this is limited, the perception of such ...

By Alessandro Bolpagni, Eleonora Ristuccia, and Grazia Ludovica Giardini More than ten years ago, Halummu launched an online campaign entitled “Supporting Ribat and Jihad” to urge IS munasirin to spread IS propaganda material “to as many platforms and accounts as possible”, underlying that the “ongoing war between the camp of kufr and the camp of ...