Blog

by Rebecca MacKinnon In response to the tragic massacre in Paris, the French government has called for UN member states to work together on an international legal framework that would place greater responsibility on social networks and other Internet platforms for terrorist use of their services. In addressing the problem of terrorist use of social networking ...

by Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin In the past two decades we have passed through three phases of media ecology, and each has shaped a different way media have entered into the operations and understandings of war and conflict. The 1990s saw the final stage of broadcast era war. National and satellite television and the press had ...

by Joe Galvin It has been 11 years since U.S. President George W. Bush gave his ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln signaling the end of major combat operations in Iraq. “In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed,” Bush said. It was a speech that was to ...

by Ian Brown The second Vox-Pol workshop, on the ethics and politics of online monitoring of violent extremism, took place in Brussels from 19-20 January. Around thirty experts – from law enforcement and intelligence agencies, governments and parliaments, civil society, and universities – met for two days to discuss the challenges that have dominated the ...

by Eliot Higgins In recent years, content shared via social media from conflict war zones has allowed us to gain a far deeper understanding of the on-the-ground realities of specific conflicts than previously possible. This presents a real opportunity for providing robust evidence which can underpin foreign and security policymaking about emerging, or rapidly escalating, ...

by Ruth Manning We live in an age where our political, religious, and other beliefs are being shaped by online content and interaction. Social media sites including Facebook and Twitter are powerful platforms that, amongst other things, present the opportunity for individuals to communicate radical ideas and opinions, and can therefore act as vehicles for ...

by David Stevens and Kieron O’Hara Last week in this blog, we argued that goods such as belonging and commitment were the chief drivers of extremist groups, alongside a rejection of mainstream thinking. In a book which appears next month, The Devil’s Long Tail, we claim that suppressing ideological messages in the hope of preventing ...

by David Stevens and Kieron O’Hara The attacks by Islamist gunmen on the Parisian offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine and elsewhere have shocked the world, drawing attention away from ISIS and the Syria and Iraq conflicts, and back to the apparent enemy within. Europe’s wealthy, tolerant and secure democracies, the story goes, harbour a critical ...

By Joseph A. Carter, Shiraz Maher and Peter R. Neumann Over a twelve month period from early 2013 to early 2014 a team of researchers at ICSR created a database of social media profiles of 190 Western and European foreign fighters. More than two thirds of these fighters were affiliated with Jabhat al-Nusrah or the ...

by Derek O’Callaghan YouTube’s status as the most popular video sharing platform means that it is especially useful to political extremists in their efforts to influence a wide audience. We often see links to associated videos and channels on YouTube being propagated on other social media platforms such as Twitter. In this analysis, we were ...