Blog

At the end of April, VOX-Pol’s Coordinator, Prof. Maura Conway, exchanged a series of emails with Brazilian magazine Imprensa’s Gabriela Ferigato for a feature piece she was writing on the so-called ‘Islamic State’s’ online activity. The feature appeared recently and is available to read HERE for Portuguese speakers. A lightly edited version of the original ...

by Megan Risdal Many of us know that data collection, cleaning, and processing is a time-consuming and sometimes arduous ordeal that requires patience along with elbow grease. It’s usually the end product—insights from an analysis to feed action—that motivates us to munge. In this interview, Khuram Zaman of Fifth Tribe, explains how a desire to ...

by Sheryl Prentice The internet has become a weapon for terrorists, who use social media and other technologies to organise, recruit and spread propaganda. So is it possible to turn technology around and use it to not only catch terrorists but predict and potentially stop terror attacks before they happen? One thing we can do ...

By Kirsten Fiedler In the past year, EDRi made numerous formal requests to get more information about the EU Internet Forum. This Forum was set up by the EU Commission to persuade companies to do “more” to fight terrorism. After months of obstruction from the European Commission, EDRi made a maladministration complaint to the European Ombudsman. ...

State and internet firms join to fight online abuse and incitement Online offences concerning cyber-bullying and sexual exploitation of children must be countered by governments working in partnership with internet service providers, Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald said yesterday. Irish Independent [Friday 24-06-2016] – Click here to read more   “Extremism is no longer an abstract problem. ...

By Moign Khawaja and Sara Dissanayake The Islamic State, previously calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a Sunni jihadist group active in Iraq and Syria. The group has been labeled a terrorist organisation by the UN for committing gross human ...

By Sandy Schumann Following the deaths of several African American men at the hands of police last year, the Twitter hashtag #blacklivesmatter enabled people from around the world to discuss race relations in the US. What is less well-known is that this hashtag – among others – was also used by supporters of Islamic State, who aimed to appeal ...

A workshop based on the semantic multimedia analysis for researching violent online political extremism content was held under the auspices of VOX-Pol at SRIE2016 (Security Research & Innovation Event), which took place in The Hague, The Netherlands, on June 1 and 2. SRIE is an annual event where industry, governments and knowledge institutions come together ...

By Jens-Henrik Jeppesen On 25 May, the European Commission published a set of proposals and documents under the umbrella of its Digital Single Market strategy. Among them is a Communication on ‘Online Platforms and the Digital Single Market Opportunities and Challenges for Europe’. This sets out the Commission’s conclusions and proposed actions based on its Platforms Consultation, which ...

U.S. SOCOM (Special Operations Command) has increasingly depended on commercial technology to gain an edge in battle. This has paid off as Islamic terrorists have moved some of the combat to the Internet, which they use for recruiting, fund raising, training and carrying out attacks or for defense. SOCOM is now turning to commercial Internet ...