Blog

By Elizabeth Pearson and David Sutcliffe One of the key current UK security issues is how to deal with British citizens returning from participation in ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Most of the hundreds fighting with ISIS were men and youths. But, dozens of British women and girls also travelled to join Islamic State in Syria ...

VOX-Pol convened an invitation-only workshop titled ‘Countering Violent Extremism Online and the Impact on Civil Liberties’ Berkman Klein Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard University on 23 – 24 October 2017. The purpose of the workshop was to explore the challenges and opportunities facing actors engaged in countering violent extremism online, particularly the impact of content ...

By Joe Whittaker In the aftermath of a terrorist attack, a series of events can ostensibly be relied on. As we mourn, the media frantically try to gather information about the attacker(s) and, upon learning that they used social media for some part of their activity, it is suggested by journalists, politicians, and pundits that ...

A VOX-Pol workshop, organised in collaboration with ICSR, entitled ‘Online Jihadism: Beyond the English-Language Literature’ was hosted at King’s College London on 16 – 17 October. Contributors included counter-radicalisation experts, anthropologists, political scientists, and Islamic Studies scholars. Over 90 attendees registered for the two-day event. Simultaneous translation was provided in Arabic and French throughout. Social scientists have approached online ...

By Lorand Bodo In recent years, governments and companies have had to respond to the phenomenon of terrorists and other violent extremists using the Internet, especially social media platforms, to propagate their messages and as a tool for radicalisation. For example, the UK government recently proposed to tighten the law concerning the viewing of violent ...

By Sophia Cope, Jillian C. York, and Jeremy Gillula In recent months, social media platforms—under pressure from a number of governments—have adopted new policies and practices to remove content that promotes terrorism. As the Guardian reported, these policies are typically carried out by low-paid contractors (or, in the case of YouTube, volunteers) and with little to ...

By Laurence Bindner, Raphael Gluck This article was originally published in French on Ultima Ratio. Since partly going underground in the deep-web, ISIS exerts continuous pressure to make its propaganda surface on the public web. Adapting constantly to ever more active censorship, ISIS uses the various web platforms in an opportunistic and agile way. Therefore, ...

Dr. Zoey Reeve is joining UCL this September as VOX-Pol’s 2017 – 2018 Research Fellow. Zoey’s research will utilise Social and Evolutionary Psychology theory and methods, to think through and investigate online radicalisation processes.  She will focus particularly on how normal psychological processes and mechanisms can help us understand how and why people engage with ...

By Lorand Bodo The UK think-tank Policy Exchange recently published a new report on the struggle against online jihadist extremism, or what its authors call “the New Netwar”. The report argues that we are currently struggling to find appropriate ways to combat online jihadist extremism and therefore losing the war online against the so-called ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS). ...

By Tom Morrison-Bell The encryption debate has reared its head again as the Home Secretary visited the US to meet with tech firms to understand the work being done to tackle extremism. In an article in The Telegraph, the Home Secretary appears to restate the Government’s desire for some sort of back-door to end-to-end encryption ...