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By Shannon Zimmerman Last Saturday, a man armed with a large knife entered the Westfield shopping centre at Bondi Junction in Sydney. He proceeded to attack over a dozen people before being killed by a policewoman. Video footage appears to show the attacker avoiding men and targeting women. Five of the six people killed in ...

By Sam Jackson For more than a decade, we’ve been debating how to respond to hate speech – broadly understood as “offensive discourse targeting a group or an individual based on inherent characteristics (such as race, religion or gender).”1 The status quo in the United States holds that governments may not restrict speech outside of narrow exceptions (for ...

By Francisco Javier Saavedra Macías, Universidad de Sevilla In May 1097, during the siege of Nicaea, crusaders catapulted the severed heads of prisoners over the walls surrounding the city, with the aim of terrorising their enemy. The strategy worked. On June 19 of the year the crusaders captured the city. However, only those who lived ...

Today, Tuesday 5 March 2024, VOX-Pol publishes its newest report, Online Jihadist Propaganda Dissemination Strategies, by Stuart Macdonald and Sean McCafferty. The report is available in full and for free on the VOX-Pol Publications page. The authors discussed the new report on a Tech Against Terrorism Podcast episode last week, titled ‘How has the Online ...

By Alex Borkowski, York University, Canada; Marion Tempest Grant, York University, Canada, and Natalie Coulter, York University, Canada An increasingly volatile online environment is affecting our society, including members of the academic community and research they pursue. Graduate students are especially vulnerable to online hate, because cultivating a visible social media presence is considered essential ...

By Ellie Rogers Most major tech companies are actively removing illegal content such as terrorist and violent extremist content (TVEC) as part of the e-Commerce directive. However, there has been an increasing focus on the need for tech companies to address borderline TVEC proportionately, consistently and transparently. There is no universal definition for borderline TVEC, ...

By Kenneth R. Hanson, C.J. Pascoe, and Ryan Light This article summarizes a recent paper published in Sex Roles that examines how cultural issues of masculinity, whiteness, and straightness are expressed and valued on the semi-anonymous online forum Reddit.     Today’s world might seem more egalitarian than ever, with legal rights protecting numerous minority populations ...

By Lindsay Hahn Terrorists killed more than 20,000 people in 2019 alone. According to the Global Terrorism Database, more than 900,000 actors were responsible for directly perpetrating over 200,000 terrorist attacks between the years of 1970-2019. Countless additional actors are likely to have indirectly helped the groups plan their attacks. Although it might seem reasonable ...

By Elizabeth Pearson  In 2018 Twitter removed radical right activist turned self-styled ‘journalist’ Tommy Robinson from the platform. Five years later, he is back. What are the implications for British politics and extremism? Tommy Robinson is the latest of a group of extreme and anti-Islam actors Elon Musk has readmitted to Twitter/X. Robinson’s account reappeared ...

By Sean McCafferty & Kamil Yilmaz This analysis is Part 2 of a two-part post. Both are based on data gathered between 7 October and 9 October 2023 from two Telegram channels sharing propaganda related to the unfolding violence in Israel and Palestine: an official Telegram channel of the al-Qassam Brigades and an unofficial pro-Hamas ...