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Christian Nationalism in the Case of the Dilley Meme Team
May 1, 2024By 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, 2024By 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 ...
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Documenting Andrew Tate – learning from documentary film
April 17, 2024By 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 ...
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Bad news travels fast: the co-optation of mainstream media to promote radical and extremist ideologies online
April 10, 2024By Dr Melissa-Ellen Dowling Note: This blog post is a modified version of the article: Melissa-Ellen Dowling (2024) News to me: far-right news sharing on social media, Information, Communication & Society, 27:1, 39-55. To learn more about this research, please see the original study, available at: DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2023.2166796. How are extremist political ideologies communicated online? What enables political claims to gain traction ...
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Reflecting on Hizb ut-Tahrir’s 2024 ban in the UK: exploring the group’s ideology and tactics
April 3, 2024By Elisa Orofino Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT, literally “the Party of Liberation”) stands as one of the most long-living, transnational Islamist groups inspiring movements and organisations around the world since its inception in 1953 in Palestine. While no official figures on the membership have ever been published, it seems fair to state the HT is currently ...
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Seeing Eye to Eye: The Delphi Method & Potential Benefits to Mulistakeholderism in the P/CVE Space
March 28, 2024By Ninian Frenguelli 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 ...
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Extremism (Re)defined: Online and Wider implications
March 21, 2024By Lee Jarvis and Stuart Macdonald The growing number of regulatory regimes aimed at moderating online terrorist and violent extremist content, coupled with more informal processes for law enforcement and other state actors to refer such content to tech companies, have been described as the public-private co-production of security. In this context, it is significant ...
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Understanding Incels’ Psychology, Ideology, and Networking
March 20, 2024By Joe Whittaker (Swansea University), William Costello (University of Texas at Austin), and Andrew Thomas (Swansea University) Involuntary Celibates (incels) have become a prescient security concern in recent years. This is, in large part, due to the handful of terror attacks conducted by individuals who are part of the online movement, who forge a sense ...
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Using AI to monitor the internet for terror content is inescapable – but also fraught with pitfalls
March 13, 2024Stuart Macdonald, Swansea University; Ashley A. Mattheis, Dublin City University, and David Wells, Swansea University Every minute, millions of social media posts, photos and videos flood the internet. On average, Facebook users share 694,000 stories, X (formerly Twitter) users post 360,000 posts, Snapchat users send 2.7 million snaps and YouTube users upload more than 500 ...
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Exploring Far-Right Community Building through Netnography
March 6, 2024By Jonathan Collins This piece examines how far-right online communities on the social media platform Gab Social are built through identity-building narratives. It is also part of a recently published article in Terrorism and Political Violence. Introduction Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are taking steps to counter harmful far-right content and ...