Blog

Our VOX-Pol colleagues, Jonathan Bright and Bharath Ganesh (Oxford Internet Institute), have issued a Call for Papers for Special Issue Responses to Online Extremism. The intent of this special issue is to ‘map and evaluate emerging public-private partnerships, technologies, and responses to online extremism.’ There are three leading aspects of concern that the issue will ...

  VOX-Pol has released its latest report in the VOX-Pol publication series, titled The Alt-Right Twitter Census:  Defining and Describing the Audience for Alt-Right Content on Twitter, authored by J.M. Berger, on 15 October 2018. About the Report This report defines and describes the alt-right audience on twitter, and identifies the top ten most influential twitter accounts ...

On October 2, Dr. Kate Coyer of  VOX-Pol partner institute CEU, spoke at a conference hosted by the German Konrad Adenauer Foundation. The conference was titled “Mind the gap: Radicalization and De-Radicalization in Theory and Practice“. Participants and speakers discussed differences and similarities between European states in tackling radicalization and de-radicalization, reasons and motives that drive ...

By Laura Jakli and Paul Gill This blog post summarises the preliminary results of a VOX-Pol supported study that estimates the effects of social media echo chambers on political polarisation. Social Media and Political Polarisation Countless news articles and studies argue that social media exacerbates political polarisation and distorts the political news landscape. The general argument put ...

By Jade Hutchinson The ‘Right’ Kind of Dogma Radical-right groups harness online platforms to disseminate dogmas against the ‘Other’. In response to an influx of foreign migrants, the concatenation of Islamist terrorism and record levels of distrust in government institutions, the radical-right is invigorated by an aggressive anti-‘Other’ sentiment. As the source of social anxiety and ...

On Thursday, 27 September, 2018 the Kozmetsky Center at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas featured VOX-Pol Coordinator, Prof. Maura Conway, for their first event of the 2018-2019 academic year. Prof. Conway’s presentation entitled “Understanding Exploitation of the Internet and Social Media in Promoting Violent Extremism and Terrorism”  drew an interested audience of students and faculty. Prof. Conway’s visit to Austin also included a ...

By Sam Jackson For years, researchers studying online political extremism have used computational tools to collect large amounts of data from social media, most often from Twitter. Two main logics guide these data collections: they can be built around users (e.g., collecting all tweets sent by given accounts) or they can be built around vocabulary (e.g., ...

Violent Extremism, Terrorism, and the Internet: Present and Future Trends University of Amsterdam, 20 – 21 August Session One: Extremist Dualities: Online vs Offline, Homogeneity vs Heterogeneity Boots on the ground? Online and Offline Identities of the Extreme Right Bradley Galloway (University of the Fraser Valley and AVE Network), Ryan Scrivens (Concordia University and VOX-Pol), ...

Read in German Read in French Read in Spanish By Peter King When the so-called Islamic State ramped up its media operation in the summer of 2014 to promote its territorial advances across Iraq and Syria, terrorism researchers who had been in the business for a decade or more were forced to take a step ...

VOX-Pol has released its latest report in the VOX-Pol publication series, titled Horizons Of Hate: A Comparative Approach to Social Media Hate Speech, authored by Matti Pohjonen, on 11 September 2018. About the Report In the report, Pohjonen employs a comparative approach to social media hate speech. The study compares a Finnish anti-refugee and anti-immigration Facebook ...