Blog

By Marco Bastos and Shawn T. Walker Facebook recently announced dramatic data access restrictions on its app and website. The company framed the lockdown as an attempt to protect user information, in response to the public outcry following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But the decision is in line with growing restrictions imposed on researchers studying ...

By Shelley Hepworth A group of 20 academics based at universities around the world have written an open letter to Facebook, calling on the company to rethink how it engages with the research community. In the wake of recent controversies over privacy, Facebook recently announced restrictions to third-party access to public user data via its Application ...

We’re at Swansea University this week for a joint workshop with The Cyberterrorism Project on ‘The Ethics of Internet-mediated Terrorism Research,’ so we thought we’d post a Blog on ethics-related issues. [Ed.] By Natasha Whiteman When the Facebook data of 50m users was collected by Cambridge academic Aleksandr Kogan, his actions reportedly came to the ...

By Haroro J. Ingram & Alastair Reed In Part I of this series, the authors presented the key findings of the CTSC Project’s latest publication titled “Islamic State’s English-language Magazines, 2014-17: Trends & Implications for CT-CVE Strategic Communications”. It began by highlighting the limitations inherent to studies of ISIS’s English language messaging before identifying the first ...

By Haroro J. Ingram & Alastair Reed The challenges associated with confronting militant Islamist propaganda have not waned with the territorial demise of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS). Sure, ISIS’s propaganda output is down overall from the peaks of 2015 and this downward trend has provided the backdrop for periods of particularly sharp declines in mid-2016 and late-2017. ...

By Emma Llansó In early March the European Commission released its “Recommendation on measures to effectively tackle illegal content online”, which presents the Commission’s ideas for how to speed up removal of allegedly illegal content. (CDT’s full analysis of the Recommendation is here.) The Recommendation includes a number of departures from the traditional court-order process, which ...

By Raheel Nawaz The UK government – with considerable pomp and ceremony – recently unveiled a new online tool for detection and removal of jihadi videos boasting a high success rate. It has been claimed by the Home Office that the machine learning tool, which the government developed with ASI Data Science, can identify 94% ...

By Kiriloi M. Ingram Since the self-proclaimed Caliphate’s inception, debate amongst scholars has ensued over whether the Islamic State’s (IS’s) muhajirat (female émigrés) would become female combatants. For example, Nelly Lahoud argues that IS is unlikely to devise a policy explicitly allowing women to engage in combat, as legitimating such a role would allow women to ...

By Adam G. Klein As the National Rifle Association, the most influential gun rights advocacy group in the U.S., comes under pressure from victims’ groups and gun control advocates, internet companies like Amazon, Apple and YouTube are finding themselves uncomfortably close to the center of the controversy. These are among the companies that currently stream the ...

This is the second in a two-part series; part one is HERE. By Anne Speckhard & Ardian Shajkovci Last week’s Blog post described ICVSE’s efforts directing counter narratives into the ISIS-dominated Internet space. This post discusses the ethics of attempting such interventions. As in all our work, our research ethics for Internet interventions with ISIS ...