Blog

By Ryan Scrivens and Amarnath Amarasingam Following the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Canadian right-wing extremist (RWE) groups tried desperately to band together, planning a number of rallies and events in some of the nation’s most urban cities to show support for the extreme right in general and to promote racist, anti-immigration sentiment ...

In recent years, deadly white supremacist violence at houses of worship in Pittsburgh, Christchurch, and Poway demonstrated the clear line from violent hate speech and radicalization online to in-person violence. With perpetrators of horrific violence taking inspiration from online forums, leveraging the anonymity and connectivity of the internet, and developing sophisticated strategies to spread their ...

By Mehwish Rani Foreign fighters became a subject of the global security debate when many young Europeans, male and female, started travelling to Syria to take part in the conflict there in 2014 and 2015. In Pakistan, the foreign fighter phenomenon has a longer history, having emerged in the 1980s during the Soviet-Afghan War. From ...

By Neil Shortland and Allyssa McCabe In the weeks following two mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, police forces across the United States made more than 20 arrests based on threats made on social media. Police in Florida, for example, arrested an alleged white supremacist who, police said, threatened a shooting at a ...

By Paul Gill Reviews of the terrorism research literature regularly highlight the paucity of original data that inform analyses (Schmid and Jongman 1988; Silke 2001, 2004). In his most recent review of the literature, Silke (2013) noted: “[O]ne feels that a great deal more needs to be done before research is consistently building on past ...

Deplatforming terrorists from messaging apps may damage existing networks, but those who remain often double down in their beliefs. By Amarnath Amarasingam Earlier this week, a fellow terrorism researcher and friend sent me a text which stated: “TamTam is amazing. I missed all the early ISIS stuff on Telegram. Now I feel like I was ...

By Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández and Joanne Gray People watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Over the past few years, the video sharing platform has come under fire for its role in spreading and amplifyingextreme views. YouTube’s video recommendation system, in particular, has been criticised for radicalising young people and steering viewers ...

In cooperation with French media Le Monde (in English here), the EU DisinfoLab helped expose a French white supremacist network that uses deceptive Facebook pages to attract visitors on their website to generate revenue from online advertisements, and sell racist products as a means to support their activities. Key takeaways from our study We uncovered ...

By Colin Klein, Adam Dunn, Peter Clutton Why do people believe conspiracy theories? Is it because of who they are, what they’ve encountered, or a combination of both? The answer is important. Belief in conspiracy theories helps fuel climate change denial, anti-vaccination stances, racism, and distrust of the media and science. In a paper published ...

By Prof. Maura Conway My 2016 paper ‘Determining the Role of the Internet in Violent Extremism and Terrorism,’ put forward six suggestions for progressing research in our field. These suggestions, briefly, related to (1) widening the range of types of violent online extremism being studied beyond violent jihadis; (2) engaging in more comparative research, not ...