Blog

By Philippa Smith When it comes to debates about free speech that needs to be protected and hate speech that needs to be legislated, the idiom of “drawing the line” is constantly referenced by politicians, journalists and academics. It has surfaced again as New Zealanders struggle to comprehend the abhorrence of the Christchurch terror attack and ...

By David Watts Data ethics is now a cause célèbre. “Digital ethics and privacy” shot into research and advisory company Gartner’s top ten strategic technology trends for 2019. Before that it barely raised a mention. In the past year governments, corporations and policy and technology think tanks have published data ethics guides. An entire cohort ...

By Martin Innes, Helen Innes, and Diyana Dobreva Terrorist attacks are fundamentally designed to ‘terrorise, polarise and mobilise’ different segments of the public. That this is so was tragically underscored by the recent events in New Zealand, where the perpetrator very obviously and self-consciously prepared a messaging campaign to accompany his acts of violence. Recognising these ...

By Manuel R. Torres Soriano The European Commission intends to adopt a new regulation aimed at strengthening the fight against terrorist content on the Internet. The main innovation is a catalogue of very specific obligations for companies providing services, imposed with the threat of heavy penalties. With this move, the EU is abandoning its previous ...

By Mike Caulfield Sam prides himself on questioning conventional wisdom and subjecting claims to intellectual scrutiny. For kids today, that means Googling stuff. One might think these searches would turn up a variety of perspectives, including at least a few compelling counterarguments. One would be wrong. The Google searches flooded his developing brain with endless ...

By Laurence Bindner This post was originally published on our Blog in French in January 2019. It was cross-posted with permission from Ultima Ratio, IFRI’s security and defence Blog. This is its first time appearing in English. [Ed.] The appeal trial of the administrators of the Ansar al-Haqq forum got under way at the Paris Regional ...

New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern and French President Macron are co-hosting a meeting in Paris today to discuss a New Zealand-spearheaded plan, named the “Christchurch Call,” to eliminate violent extremist and terrorist content from the Internet. The below post summarises the tech sector’s response(s) to the exploitation of their services by the Christchurch terrorist’s sympathisers ...

This Blog post is a lightly edited version of a report prepared by the EU Internet Referral Unit in Europol and circulated to law enforcement agencies and member states in October 2018. It is appearing here publicly for the first time, at the request of Europol. [Ed.] Key Takeaways Non-violent material is integral to terrorists’ propaganda ...

By Stuart M Bender The shocking mass-shooting in Christchurch on 15 March was notable for using livestreaming video technology to broadcast horrific first-person footage of the shooting on social media. The perpetrator of this week’s attack on a California synagogue also allegedly planned to livestream the latter, except this did not materialise The use of social media technology ...

By Ross Frenett Introduction The murder of Lyra McKee on Good Friday has shone a spotlight on an often under-reported and under-analysed form of violent extremism, violent dissident republicanism (VDR).  McKee’s murder was not an aberration; in the past number of years, VDR groups have killed two soldiers, two Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) ...