Blog
Examining Online Behaviours: Violent and Non-Violent Right-Wing Extremists During Peak Posting Days
June 19, 2024
By Ryan Scrivens For more on these findings and the nature of the study in general, see the full manuscript which was recently published open access in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. Despite the ongoing need for practitioners to identify violent right-wing extremists (RWEs) online before their engagement in violence offline, there is little empirical knowledge about their digital footprints in general ...
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Unmasking the Dark Side of Humour: Far-Right Strategic Mainstreaming in Memes
June 12, 2024
By Ursula Schmid, Heidi Schulze and Antonia Drexel Memes are an important part of social media communication, frequently associated with contemporary (pop)culture. Even though most people use memes for benign purposes, beneath the surface of seemingly innocent jokes lies a darker underbelly: there has been a substantial debate regarding the use of memes to spread ...
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Male-supremacy as a violent political ideology
June 5, 2024
By Shannon Zimmerman Last Saturday, a man armed with a large knife entered the Westfield shopping centre at Bondi Junction in Sydney. He proceeded to attack over a dozen people before being killed by a policewoman. Video footage appears to show the attacker avoiding men and targeting women. Five of the six people killed in ...
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Seeing Eye to Eye: Recognising the ‘Public’ as a Stakeholder in Multistakeholder Initiatives
May 29, 2024
By Connor Rees The Seeing Eye to Eye: Developing Sustainable Multistakeholder Communities (SE2E) project was developed and funded through the 2022 Terrorism and Social Media (TASM) Conference sandpit event. The project aim is conducting empirical research into how various stakeholders view and experience multistakeholderism in countering terrorism and violent extremism online (TVE) as part of the larger ...
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Two Harms of Hate Speech and the Limits of Counter-Speech
May 22, 2024
By Sam Jackson For more than a decade, we’ve been debating how to respond to hate speech – broadly understood as “offensive discourse targeting a group or an individual based on inherent characteristics (such as race, religion or gender).”1 The status quo in the United States holds that governments may not restrict speech outside of narrow exceptions (for ...
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‘News overload’: how a constant stream of violent images affects your brain
May 15, 2024
By Francisco Javier Saavedra Macías, Universidad de Sevilla In May 1097, during the siege of Nicaea, crusaders catapulted the severed heads of prisoners over the walls surrounding the city, with the aim of terrorising their enemy. The strategy worked. On June 19 of the year the crusaders captured the city. However, only those who lived ...
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The Potential of Short Form Videos as P/CVE Messages
May 8, 2024
By Joe Whittaker, Farangiz Atamuradova, Kamil Yilmaz, Simon Copeland, Lilah El Sayed, Jon Deedman Short form video has, put simply, become one of the most popular social media formats on the Internet. By “short form” we mean videos of around 30-90 seconds; each platform that utilises it has their own specifications about the minimum and ...
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Christian Nationalism in the Case of the Dilley Meme Team
May 1, 2024
By Phoebe Jones In early January 2024, ahead of the Iowa Caucus, Donald Trump posted a video titled “God Made Trump” to his Truth Social account. The video is a play on Paul Harvey’s “So God Made a Farmer” speech, which he delivered at the Future Farmers of America Convention in 1978 to valorize farmers and overtly link ...
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Seeing Eye to Eye: Countering the ‘illusion of inclusion’ in P/CVE multistakeholder initiatives
April 24, 2024
By Hirah Azhar The Seeing Eye to Eye: Developing Sustainable Multistakeholder Communities (SE2E) project was developed and funded through the 2022 Terrorism and Social Media (TASM) Conference sandpit event. The project aim is conducting empirical research into how various stakeholders view and experience multistakeholderism in countering terrorism and violent extremism online (TVE) as part of the larger ...
Blog
Documenting Andrew Tate – learning from documentary film
April 17, 2024
By Nick Robinson Introduction With over 11bn views on TikTok and accusations that his extreme views are creating real world harm, Andrew Tate’s rise has precipitated alarm amongst policy makers, the media and the public and is symptomatic of the ‘growing visibility of online “manfluencers” who espouse extreme masculine ideals and share them with their ...