Blog
News
Dr. Kate Coyer speaks at German Konrad Adenauer Foundation Conference
October 12, 2018On 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 ...
Blog
Follow the Echo Chamber: Measuring Political Attitude Change and Media Effects on Twitter
October 10, 2018By 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 ...
Blog
The Australian New-Right Movement: Online and ‘Others’
October 3, 2018By 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 ...
News
VOX-Pol Programme Coordinator presents in Texas
September 28, 2018On 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 ...
Blog
FlockWatch: Tracking Changes in Language in Text Datasets Over Time
September 26, 2018By 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., ...
Events
Conference Presentation Slides
September 25, 2018Violent 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), ...
Blog
Building Resilience for Terrorism Researchers
September 19, 2018Read 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 ...
News
New Report Investigates Increasing Levels of Online Polarisation and its Effects on Hate Speech
September 13, 2018VOX-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 ...
Blog
The Ethics of Academia-Counter-Terrorism Police Collaboration
September 12, 2018By Mike Edwards My belief in the value of collaboration between police and academics stems from a policing conference on domestic violence, stalking and sexual violence that I attended as a young police officer. Criminal behavioural analyst Laura Richards delivered the keynote speech. This sparked a personal interest in human behavioural analysis and specialist criminal ...
Blog
Ethics is Method, Method is Ethics: What Terrorism Researchers Should Know
September 5, 2018By Carol Winkler One of the attendees at the recent Ethics of Terrorism Research workshop held at Swansea University poignantly observed, “ethics is method, method is ethics.” This rich concept has various implications for how terrorism researchers should think about their work. To start such a conversation, I will revisit Simon Cottee and Jack Cunliffe’s ...