Blog

By Saif Tahir Nihilism, defined by the ISD as “an ideology that centres around rejection of all moral and social values with the belief that life is meaningless,” rose to recent prominence after the detection and arrest of members of the decentralised COM and 764 networks who were found coercing minors aged 8-17 into violence. ...

Amarnath Amarasingam, Queen’s University, Ontario Two teenaged gunmen recently opened fire at the Islamic Center of San Diego, killing a security guard and two staff members before being found with fatal self-inflicted wounds in a nearby vehicle. Like so many recent extremist mass shootings, they livestreamed the attack and, uniquely, even livestreamed their suicides. Police ...

By Kamil Yilmaz In April 2026, Türkiye was shaken by two unprecedented school shootings in the country’s southeastern region. The first attack was carried out on April 14 by Ömer Ket, a 19-year-old former student at Ahmet Koyuncu Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School in Siverek, Şanlıurfa, who injured 16 people before dying by suicide. ...

The Meta Oversight Board’s Advisory Opinion on Global Community Notes Rollout By Yohannes Eneyew Ayalew & Maria O’Sullivan Meta is a powerful global company, operating social media platforms that shape public opinion and influence elections. However, the company’s attempts to counter false or misleading information on its platforms has been the subject of widespread criticism ...

By Bo Min Keum First: why history? Incel subculture did not start misogynistic or violent. This has been largely acknowledged. What’s less understood is how exactly celibacy came to be about misogyny and violence over time. Understanding this history matters today because it shows that radicalization is not a unilateral outcome of online platforms or ...

By Andrew Whiting Having begun their inquiries in May 2025, the Home Affairs Select Committee last month published their report into combatting new forms of extremism. The report is a welcome addition to the discussion with several important recommendations. The range of expertise the committee engaged with has helped give it good coverage across a range of ...

By Kawser Ahmed As the nation mourns after Canada’s deadliest school shooting in modern history, a question looms for people both close to the events and further away: Why? As with other mass shootings, this painful question is complex and difficult to answer. As reported by the New York Times, an investigation into the shooter’s ...

By Sean McCafferty In recent years there has been suggestion of a tech backslide by major social media platforms, leading to a reduction in proactive content moderation. This has become a significant concern for scholars of online terrorism. This blog post examines a sample of empirical data from Facebook that suggests there is a resurgence ...

By Nauval El Ghifari Extremism in the Age of Short Form Content Over the past decade, online extremism has not disappeared so much as it has changed form. Earlier expressions were concentrated on closed forums and ideological websites; contemporary ones increasingly surface within mainstream social media. What has shifted is not the presence of extremist ...

By Joshua Skoczylis and John Babalola The question is no longer whether social media platforms influence politics. They do. The question is whether democratic life can endure when the central infrastructure of public communication is engineered to reward extremism, disinformation, and division — and when its owners are increasingly invested in this outcome. The far ...