Blog

Anat Lior, Drexel University On Feb. 10, 2026, an 18-year-old woman, Jesse Van Rootselaar, killed eight people and herself in a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. OpenAI had previously flagged her ChatGPT conversations as having a disturbing fascination with extreme violence, and suspended her account, but reportedly the company did not notify law ...

By Mischa Gerrard When footage of a knife attack in north Belfast began circulating online, the incident quickly escaped the confines of the street on which it had occurred. Within hours, it was being shared and debated across X, amplified by activists, influencers, and political commentators both within and beyond Northern Ireland. Demonstrations were organised, ...

By Krista Fisher, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Emily Lewis, Ruben Benakovic, and Zac Seidler Interest in the manosphere has recently surged yet again, with the recent Louis Theroux documentary catapulting the term “manosphere” back to the forefront of our cultural psyche. The term has become a catchall for the most inflammatory content and communities in young men’s ...

VOX-Pol is delighted to announce the upcoming publication of The Routledge Handbook of Online Violent Extremism, produced in proud partnership with our network. Scheduled for release in September 2026, this landmark volume represents a major milestone in the study of digital threats and responses. This handbook stands as the first comprehensive reference work to offer ...

By Saddiq Basha The re-enactment of real-world mass casualty attacks on Roblox has become a recognised phenomenon within the True Crime Community (TCC)—a multi-layered online fandom that valorises perpetrators of mass violence regardless of ideology, ranging from those who consume and discuss such content to those who, at the extreme, seek to emulate them. Such ...

By Inger Storm Sandboe and Antara Chakraborthy Introduction Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary on the manosphere has renewed mainstream attention to online subcultures often dismissed as fringe. This coincides with a broader discursive shift: the normalisation of a distinct ‘biological’ vocabulary in manosphere discourse. This rhetoric usually relies on a weak scientific basis, selectively interpreted or ...

We are excited to announce that a brand-new series of videos is now live on the VOX-Pol YouTube Channel! Bringing together leading global experts, practitioners, and the next generation of scholars, these videos tackle some of the most pressing challenges in the online extremist landscape today—from the rise of artificial intelligence to the weaponization of ...

Welcome to Volume 13, Issue 6 of the monthly VOX-Pol Newsletter Catch Up on the 2026 VOX-Pol Lecture Series! We are thrilled to share that the latest 2026 VOX-Pol Lecture Series is now fully recorded and available to view on the VOX-Pol YouTube channel.This curated series brings together world-leading scholars, tech experts, and practitioners to ...

By Saif Tahir Nihilism, defined by the ISD as “an ideology that centres around rejection of all moral and social values with the belief that life is meaningless,” rose to recent prominence after the detection and arrest of members of the decentralised COM and 764 networks who were found coercing minors aged 8-17 into violence. ...

Amarnath Amarasingam, Queen’s University, Ontario Two teenaged gunmen recently opened fire at the Islamic Center of San Diego, killing a security guard and two staff members before being found with fatal self-inflicted wounds in a nearby vehicle. Like so many recent extremist mass shootings, they livestreamed the attack and, uniquely, even livestreamed their suicides. Police ...