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“Dead society”: Tracing the Online Dimension of a Militant Accelerationist-Inspired Attack in Turkey
September 4, 2024By Arthur Bradley An assailant injured at least five people with a knife in a tea garden in Sehit Rustem Demirbas Park, Eskisehir, northwestern Turkey, on 12 August. Police apprehended the 18-year-old suspect within a few minutes of the violence starting. He was dressed in camouflage trousers and an assault vest, helmet, goggles and skull mask, and also reportedly carried ...
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Misogyny, Misandry and (Online Cult) Leader: The Daily Emails of Andrew Tate
July 24, 2024By Elizabeth Pearson Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is now a national emergency. A new report by the UK National Police Chiefs’ Council this week noted VAWG-related crimes increased by 37% between 2018 and 2023, with male perpetrators ever younger. Much is technology-related, and police chiefs noted young men are being ‘radicalised’ into misogyny ...
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We research online ‘misogynist radicalisation’. Here’s what parents of boys should know
July 10, 2024By Steven Roberts, Monash University and Stephanie Wescott, Monash University Many parents are worried about their children using social media. But these concerns tend to focus on privacy, exposure to explicit material or contact with strangers. As researchers looking at sexism and misogyny in Australian schools and the influence of social media, we think it ...
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Borderline Content Online
July 3, 2024By 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 ...
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The proscription of Terrorgram as a terrorist organisation in the UK: Insights from the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation
June 26, 2024By 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 ...
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Examining Online Behaviours: Violent and Non-Violent Right-Wing Extremists During Peak Posting Days
June 19, 2024By 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 ...
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Seeing Eye to Eye: Recognising the ‘Public’ as a Stakeholder in Multistakeholder Initiatives
May 29, 2024By 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 ...
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Two Harms of Hate Speech and the Limits of Counter-Speech
May 22, 2024By 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 ...
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‘News overload’: how a constant stream of violent images affects your brain
May 15, 2024By 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 ...
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Christian Nationalism in the Case of the Dilley Meme Team
May 1, 2024By Phoebe Jones In early January 2024, ahead of the Iowa Caucus, Donald Trump posted a video titled “God Made Trump” to his Truth Social account. The video is a play on Paul Harvey’s “So God Made a Farmer” speech, which he delivered at the Future Farmers of America Convention in 1978 to valorize farmers and overtly link ...