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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 ...
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Seeing Eye to Eye: The Crucial Role of Legitimacy in Multistakeholder Initiatives
February 28, 2024By Lea Brost 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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The Dangers of Generative AI and Extremism
February 21, 2024by Sam Jackson and JM Berger Generative AI tools have exploded in number and complexity within a few short years. Products such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, and countless others represent a massive leap forward over earlier efforts in both text and image generation. Some AI evangelists even suggest that these models could soon supplement or replace people in professional roles, including ...
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The Passive Extremism of Social Media in the Bronx Drill Scene
February 14, 2024By Matthew K. Carter On July 9, 2022, fourteen-year-old Ethan Reyes, better known as drill rapper Notti Osama, was stabbed to death on a New York City subway platform during a confrontation with a fifteen-year-old rival gang member. A couple months later, drill rappers Kyle Richh, Tata, and Jenn Carter, all members of the rap ...
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A picture is worth a thousand (s)words: classification and diffusion of memes on a partisan media platform
February 7, 2024By Esteban Villa-Turek, Rod Abhari, Mowafak Allaham, Chloe Mortenson & Ayse D. Lokmanoglu Introduction On November 3, 2020, as presidential votes were being cast around the United States, another form of political discussion was taking place on Parler, a far-right social media platform. Users had been using memes to shape the discussion around political events ...
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Seeing Eye to Eye: Viewing Multistakeholder Work through a Participatory Lens
January 31, 2024By Ashley A. Mattheis 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 ...
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Exploiting Political Crises: How Terrorists’ Polarize the Public and Garner Support in their Propaganda Campaigns
January 24, 2024By Mor Yachin & Rebecca Wilson In a world marked by political unrest and turmoil, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is among the most polarizing and contested conflicts in history – one that offers tremendous persuasive power to extremist propaganda. Groups like Al Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) have become increasingly adept at producing ...