Blog

The VOX-Pol Blog is now in its 6th year, with just over 380 posts having been published to-date. We always welcome original posts, we cross-post with permission, and can also accept posts that have been published elsewhere in languages other than English and have them translated. Please email info@voxpol.eu with submissions and/or questions. Each year during August we take ...

VOX-Pol is pleased to make the article Down the (White) Rabbit Hole: The Extreme Right and Online Recommender Systems, published in 2014 in the Journal Social Science Computer Review open access. The research is a multidisciplinary collaboration between University College Dublin School of Computer Science & Informatics and Dublin City University School of Law & ...

By Jim Killock The CTIRU’s work consists of filing notifications of terrorist-related content to platforms, for them to consider removals. They say they have removed over 300,000 pieces of extremist content. Censor or not censor? The CTIRU consider its scheme to be voluntary, but detailed notification under the e-Commerce Directive has legal effect, as it ...

VOX-Pol is pleased to present a new, open access research article by former VOX-Pol Fellow Zoey Reeve. The study, titled Engaging with Online Extremist Material: Experimental Evidence was published in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence online on 24 July 2019. ABOUT THE ARTICLE Despite calls from governments to clamp down on violent extremist material in the online ...

By Manuel R. Torres-Soriano The collapse of Islamic State’s “caliphate” has had an enormous impact on jihadist activism on the Internet. In a short space of time, we have witnessed a shift from an ecosystem that orbited around the leadership of a strong organisation capable of shouldering the initiative and most of the work needed to ...

VOX-Pol has released its latest report in the VOX-Pol publication series, titled Reconciling Impact and Ethics: An Ethnography of Research in Violent Online Political Extremism, authored by Dounia Mahlouly, on 23 July 2019. About the Report Gathering empirical evidence from interviews and focus groups, this study highlights some of the ethical dilemmas face d by the academic ...

By Cori E. Dauber and Mark D. Robinson Despite the fact that there is a robust conversation regarding “terrorism and technology,” that discussion uniformly addresses – as near as we can tell – the back end, the dissemination of what terrorists have already produced. We have found virtually nothing in the popular press[1] and nothing in ...

By Pamela Ligouri Bunker and Robert J. Bunker The 2019 Terrorism and Social Media (TASM) Conference took place on 25 and 26 June 2019 at Swansea University Bay Campus, Wales, United Kingdom. The conference was organised by Swansea University’s Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law and its Cyber Threats Research Centre (CYTREC), with the support ...

Summary of Tech Against Terrorism’s analysis: Analysis of more than 45,000 URLs since 2014 across more than 330 platforms shows that smaller platforms are heavily targeted by ISIS and that 49% of all URLs were found on just eight of these platforms. Key conclusions: ISIS experimentation with small social media platform Koonekti is the most ...

By Philippa Smith When it comes to debates about free speech that needs to be protected and hate speech that needs to be legislated, the idiom of “drawing the line” is constantly referenced by politicians, journalists and academics. It has surfaced again as New Zealanders struggle to comprehend the abhorrence of the Christchurch terror attack and ...