Blog

By Anne Speckhard and Ardian Shajkovci With the collapse of the so-called “Islamic State” in Iraq, and much of Syria, an immediate corresponding and steady decline occurred in ISIS’ strategic communication and online propaganda activities. However, the group’s “virtual Caliphate” is rebounding and still remains very much alive today – it continues to create new content, ...

Welcome to Volume 6 Issue 1 of the VOX-Pol Newsletter. The VOX-Pol Network of Excellence for Research in Violent Online Political Extremism reached five years in December 2018; a huge thanks to everyone who has contributed along the way. The project has been given a one-year extension to December 2019 by the European Commission. In ...

VOX-Pol has released its Violent Extremism and Terrorism Online in 2018: The Year in Review today, authored by Professor Maura Conway. This is the third publication in the Year in Review series following the Year in Review 2017 and the Year in Review 2016. About the Report This report treats developments in the violent extremist and terrorist online scenes ...

By Kyle Matthews & Nicolai Pogadl In mid-September 2017 the European Union threatened to fine the Big Tech companies if they did not remove terrorist content within one hour of appearing online. The change came because rising tensions are now developing and being played out on social media platforms. Social conflicts that once built up in ...

VOX-Pol contributed to the inaugural Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN) Civil Society Empowerment Programme (CSEP) campaigns event in Brussels this week. We therefore thought we’d share some insights from a previous RAN event focused on online CVE. [Ed.] Introduction It is an essential part of extremist propaganda and outreach to not only communicate their messages to ...

VOX-Pol is contributing to the EU Internet Forum’s Civil Society Empowerment Programme (CSEP) inaugural campaigns event in Brussels on 30 and 31 January 2019. Since December 2018, and as part of the EU Internet Forum, the European Commission funds campaign projects to promote alternative narratives and empower credible voices. Under the Civil Society Empowerment Programme, the campaigns ...

By Hoda Hashem The UK government is proposing a new UK counter-terrorism bill. But can it really strike a balance between liberty and security? The UK has a long history of controversial counter-terrorism measures. The most recent is the proposed Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Bill 2018. Home Secretary Sajid Javid recently denied that the new ...

Par Laurence Bindner Le procès des administrateurs du forum Ansar al-Haqq s’est déroulé au Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris les 4, 5 et 6 Juillet 2018. Le quatre prévenus (David Ramassamy, Nordine Zaggi, Farouk ben Abbes et Léonard Lopez – ce dernier actuellement détenu par les forces kurdes dans un camp de Syrie), ont ...

By Elnura Alkanova Since the 2000s, social networks have been widely used both as platform for like-minded users and an instrument for spreading information and ideas. But the rapid dissemination of facts and opinions also results in an uncontrollable stream of information. As a result, we are witnessing an increasing number of posts with negative content ...

By Niamn Kirk, Eugenia Siapera, Gavan Titley Since ‘news tickers’ first began to crawl along the bottom of our television screens, ‘breaking news’ has become a key element in how audiences receive the news, and think about what counts as news. In a context where news stories now unfold rapidly across multiple media platforms, and an ...