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What Nazi Propaganda Can Teach Us about ISIS
October 21, 2015
by Steven Luckert In 1924, Adolf Hitler described propaganda as “a terrible weapon in the hands of an expert.” For two decades, the Nazis showed the world what a devastating weapon it could be. They won over millions of Germans to their extremist goals in a democracy by branding their movement with powerful symbols and ...
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Is Snapchat a Threat to National Security?
October 14, 2015
by Andrew Murray Last week reports emerged in the media that the proposed Investigatory Powers Bill may lead to the banning of popular communications apps Snapchat, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. This was in many ways not news as the same reports had appeared in January but with the Home Secretary announcing that the Bill would be published in the ...
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Is the Internet an Incubator for Radicalisation?
October 7, 2015
By Irene McGinn and Adam Joinson This blog post explores the reasons why some online ideological groups take action while others do not and focuses on to what extent the online communications of ideological groups contribute to direct collective action. In order to address this question, we examined a number of online groups using a variety of ...
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The Semiotics of Violent Jihadist Propaganda: The Message and the Channel
September 30, 2015
by Massimo Leone On the one hand, terrorism is the antithesis of communication. It does not aim at transmitting any message to its victims, but at annihilating them. On the other hand, yet, terrorism is extremely powerful communication for those who witness the tragedy, directly or through the media, and are either terrified or fascinated ...
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Monitoring Racist and Xenophobic Extremism to Counter Hate Speech Online: Ethical Dilemmas and Methods of a Preventive Approach
September 23, 2015
by Andrea Cerase, Elena D’Angelo and Claudia Santoro The rise of racism in Europe In recent years online racism has seen a quick and serious growth in many European and non-European countries, till to become a worrying global phenomenon.(1) One of the most striking examples of such process is the rise of White Supremacist Movements online. Their strategy ...
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The Terror You Know, the Terror You Don’t – How Extremism Has Gone Digital Since 7/7
September 16, 2015
by Alex Krasodomski-Jones A decade after 7/7, the War on Terror rumbles on. Ten years ago, it was Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein: a battle against dictators and super-terrorists responsible for thousands of deaths in the West and at home. Today it is IS, though the shaky narrative of good versus evil is looking ever-more ...
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A “Radical Sociability”: In Defence of an Online/Offline Multidimensional Approach to Radicalisation
September 9, 2015
by Benjamin Ducol Beyond a dichotomic view of radicalisation in the digital era The dichotomisation of “virtual” versus “real world” is one of the major pitfalls in current studies of radicalisation in the digital era. In many cases, scholars tend to conceptualise virtual spaces as autonomous from what actually happens in the “real world” and ...
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Using Twitter as a Data Source: An Overview of Current Social Media Research Tools
September 2, 2015
by Wasim Ahmed I have a social media research blog where I find and write about tools that can be used to capture and analyse data from social media platforms. My PhD looks at Twitter data for health, such as the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. I am increasingly asked why I am looking at Twitter, ...
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Drawing the Line Between Free Speech and Online Radicalisation
July 29, 2015
by Jacob Mchangama The global spate of terrorist attacks has brought the phenomenon of online radicalisation to the forefront. Governments and intelligence services warn that extremist groups use social media to recruit new adherents and potential terrorists. From the perspective of human rights, this raises a question – where should the line be drawn between ...
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Pop Terrorism: ISIS’ Media Campaign
July 22, 2015
By Sam Garin In a video entitled “There is no Life without Jihad,” young men shaded by verdant palm trees empathetically assure their audience that they understand their struggle as Muslims in a western country. The video shows English-speaking members of the Islamic State give calm, earnest testimonies urging Muslims in the West to join the terrorist ...