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Since late 2016, researchers came to acknowledge both ISIS’ territorial decline and much reduced visibility on mainstream social media networks. They note that its online community of supporters have migrated to encrypted communication channels and that its territory in the Levant has shrunk considerably, which—according to a recent ICSR estimate—impacted on the organisation’s financial resources. ...

Maura Conway – Disrupting Daesh: Measuring Takedown of Online Terrorist Material & Its Impacts VOX-Pol Coordinator, Maura Conway, discusses the findings of VOX-Pol’s August 2017 report ‘Disrupting Daesh: Measuring Takedown of Online Terrorist Material and Its Impacts’. Twitter ‘becoming less effective’ as platform for Islamic State Twitter is becoming less effective as a platform for ...

In one 24-hour period, 65% of Twitter accounts tweeting out-links to IS propaganda were suspended within 17 hours Focus of online disruption on IS allows other jihadi groups to outpace them on social media VOX-Pol researchers from Dublin City University, together with colleagues from the University of Sussex, have found that the social media platform, ...

The Society for Terrorism Research 11th Annual International Conference was held on 14 – 15 August 2017 in New York. It was organised by New York University’s Center for Global Affairs. The conference consisted of eight panels over two days. Contributions were made at the conference by VOX-Pol’s Dr. Paul Gill and Dr. Emily Corner ...

Welcome to Vol. 4 Iss. 3 of the VOX-Pol Newsletter. If you have colleagues or friends who may be interested in the content of our newsletter, or any events or research carried out by VOX-Pol, please forward this to them and encourage them to subscribe via our website. Follow us on Twitter @VOX_Pol for live updates and releases. ...

VOX-Pol’s Coordinator, Prof. Maura Conway, was a participant in Deakin University‘s conference on ‘Addressing the New Landscape of Terrorism: Actionable Responses,’ which took place in Bangkok from 24 – 28 July, 2017. The conference brought together academics, CVE practitioners, policymakers, law enforcement, and others to discuss a range of issues in contemporary terrorism, with a ...

By Haris Fazliu While researching Bringing Down the Digital Caliphate – Breaking the ISIS Brand (under review), for the International Center for The Study of Violent Extremism, ICSVE, I discovered that convicted terrorists in Macedonia linked to ISIS continue to share propaganda online. Jihadists currently serving sentences in Macedonian prisons freely use smartphones to watch videos, ...

By Amy-Louise Watkin and Sean Looney To involve children in terrorism is an unthinkable prospect. And yet they have become not only targets of violence, but are being used to promote radicalised causes too. This is not just about European or American children being victims of attacks by the so-called Islamic State (IS). Young people who are ...

By Samantha North On 27 and 28 June, in a sleepy Welsh city by the sea, a group of social media and terrorism researchers came together to discuss the latest challenges in the field. I learned a lot, met people doing admirable work and came away inspired with ideas to shape my own research in the ...

The Terrorism and Social Media Conference (TASM) was held on 27 to 28 June in Swansea University. The event kicked off with a keynote speech by Prof. Bruce Hoffman from Georgetown University entitled “The Threat From ISIS and al Qaeda: Contextualising the Role of Social Media” in which he emphasised that social media has played a serious ...