Blog

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 ...

Welcome to Volume 11, Issue 5 of the monthly VOX-Pol Newsletter. NEW VOX-Pol REPORT VOX-Pol is pleased to publish a new report AI Extremism: Technologies, Tactics, Actors. This report is written by Stephane Baele, Professor of International Relations at UCLouvain, and Lewys Brace, Senior Lecturer in Computational Social Science (Criminology) at Exeter University. The report was published on 25 April and was ...

By Joe Whittaker, Farangiz Atamuradova, Kamil Yilmaz, Simon Copeland, Lilah El Sayed, Jon Deedman Short form video has, put simply, become one of the most popular social media formats on the Internet. By “short form” we mean videos of around 30-90 seconds; each platform that utilises it has their own specifications about the minimum and ...

By 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 ...

VOX-Pol is pleased to publish a new report AI Extremism: Technologies, Tactics, Actors. This report is written by Stephane Baele, Professor of International Relations at UCLouvain, and Lewys Brace, Senior Lecturer in Computational Social Science (Criminology) at Exeter University. The accompanying launch event took place on Friday 3 May 2024, and is available to watch on the VOX-Pol YouTube channel. ...

By Hirah Azhar 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 Nick Robinson Introduction With over 11bn views on TikTok and accusations that his extreme views are creating real world harm, Andrew Tate’s rise has precipitated alarm amongst policy makers, the media and the public and is symptomatic of the ‘growing visibility of online “manfluencers” who espouse extreme masculine ideals and share them with their ...

VOX-Pol has created a dedicated Discord channel as part of the Next Gen Network. This space is specifically geared towards early career researchers with the creation of a supportive community at its forefront. We want to build an environment geared towards the needs of young scholars researching online extremist spaces. Come join the network if ...

By Dr Melissa-Ellen Dowling Note: This blog post is a modified version of the article: Melissa-Ellen Dowling (2024) News to me: far-right news sharing on social media, Information, Communication & Society, 27:1, 39-55. To learn more about this research, please see the original study, available at: DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2023.2166796. How are extremist political ideologies communicated online? What enables political claims to gain traction ...