Blog

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 ...

On March 5-6, 2015, the VOX-Pol network will convene a workshop at Central European University in Budapest on the role of social media and internet companies in responding to violent online political extremism and the impacts on freedom of expression. This call is especially timely given the Joint Statement of EU Ministers for Interior and ...

Monday 19 January 12.00-13:00: Lunch 13:00-15:00: Session One Chair: Ian Brown, Oxford Internet Institute Sadhbh McCarthy, Centre for Irish and European Security: The role of trust, insights and confidence on the use of OSINT (or SOCMINT) for intelligence purposes incl. in relation to the identification of violent extremism Akil Awan, Royal Holloway, University of London: ...

by David Stevens and Kieron O’Hara The attacks by Islamist gunmen on the Parisian offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine and elsewhere have shocked the world, drawing attention away from ISIS and the Syria and Iraq conflicts, and back to the apparent enemy within. Europe’s wealthy, tolerant and secure democracies, the story goes, harbour a critical ...

By Joseph A. Carter, Shiraz Maher and Peter R. Neumann Over a twelve month period from early 2013 to early 2014 a team of researchers at ICSR created a database of social media profiles of 190 Western and European foreign fighters. More than two thirds of these fighters were affiliated with Jabhat al-Nusrah or the ...

by Derek O’Callaghan YouTube’s status as the most popular video sharing platform means that it is especially useful to political extremists in their efforts to influence a wide audience. We often see links to associated videos and channels on YouTube being propagated on other social media platforms such as Twitter. In this analysis, we were ...

by Matthew Francis A parliamentary inquiry has cleared MI5 of failing to prevent the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in May 2013. This despite the fact that his killers, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, were both subjects of previous investigations by the security services – investigations which showed that both men had been radicalised. Inevitably this conclusion ...