Blog

As VOX-Pol’s March workshop in Budapest on the role of social media and internet companies in responding to violent online political extremism draws nearer, its exciting line-up of speakers is continuing to grow. Twitter will be there along with representatives from other social media giants. Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN Bureau Chief, blogger, and co-founder of Global ...

by Joe Galvin It has been 11 years since U.S. President George W. Bush gave his ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln signaling the end of major combat operations in Iraq. “In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed,” Bush said. It was a speech that was to ...

Welcome to Vol. 2, Iss. 1 of the VOX-Pol Newsletter. Year 1 of VOX-Pol was a resounding success. In the 12 months to December 2014, we hosted three events to which we welcomed 163 attendees from 24 countries (12 EU Member States and 12 non-EU countries). Our website has gathered 20,000 page-views by 5,000 visitors ...

by Ian Brown The second Vox-Pol workshop, on the ethics and politics of online monitoring of violent extremism, took place in Brussels from 19-20 January. Around thirty experts – from law enforcement and intelligence agencies, governments and parliaments, civil society, and universities – met for two days to discuss the challenges that have dominated the ...

by Eliot Higgins In recent years, content shared via social media from conflict war zones has allowed us to gain a far deeper understanding of the on-the-ground realities of specific conflicts than previously possible. This presents a real opportunity for providing robust evidence which can underpin foreign and security policymaking about emerging, or rapidly escalating, ...

VOX-Pol’s Principle Investigator Dr Maura Conway and Professor Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), a VOX-Pol partner institution, appeared on VRT, Belgium’s Flemish language public broadcaster, earlier this month. Professor Brown and Dr Conway discussed the role of the Internet in violent extremism and the social media strategies of radical groups such as ...

Rebecca MacKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices Online and Director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at New America, testified on Tuesday before the the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Foreign Affairs’ Sub-committee on Terrorism, Non-Proliferation, and Trade on ‘The Evolution of Terrorist Propaganda: The Paris Attack and Social Media.’ MacKinnon will be speaking at VOX-Pol’s 5 – 6 March workshop at Central ...

by Ruth Manning We live in an age where our political, religious, and other beliefs are being shaped by online content and interaction. Social media sites including Facebook and Twitter are powerful platforms that, amongst other things, present the opportunity for individuals to communicate radical ideas and opinions, and can therefore act as vehicles for ...

There was standing room only at the VOX-Pol panel at yesterday’s CPDP conference. The 8th International Conference on Computers, Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP) is ongoing in Brussels until Friday, 23 January. The event features 70 panels covering a wide range of current debates such as mobile technologies, border surveillance, big data, encryption, privacy and ...

by David Stevens and Kieron O’Hara Last week in this blog, we argued that goods such as belonging and commitment were the chief drivers of extremist groups, alongside a rejection of mainstream thinking. In a book which appears next month, The Devil’s Long Tail, we claim that suppressing ideological messages in the hope of preventing ...