This brief analyses the impact of the Christchurch Call to Action, issued to gather countries and technology companies to stop the use of the internet for disseminating violent extremist content. The Call was the result of a summit organised shortly after a terrorist attack in New Zealand in March 2019. This brief finds that the ...

Following the rise in far-right inspired terrorist attacks globally, social media and electronic communications companies have been criticized, mainly by politicians, for allowing far-right extremist content to be available. This article is a comparative legal study focusing on Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S.’ legal provisions regarding the right to freedom of ...

This paper offers a set of specific proposals for better describing harmful content online and for reducing the damage it causes, while protecting freedom of expression. The ideas are mainly meant for OSPs since they regulate the vast majority of online content; taken together they operate the largest system of censorship the world has ever ...

The Western Balkans faces a double challenge from online extremism. Online platforms are facilitating the specific targeting of the region by diverse international extremist narratives. Meanwhile regional histories and geopolitics are being appropriated to justify extremist actions and narratives around the world. This is part of a wider trend that underscores the growing challenge posed ...

Anecdotal evidence asserts that extremist materials on the internet play a decisive role in radicalization processes. However, due to a structural absence of empirical data in the current literature, it remains uncertain if—and to what extent—online extremist materials radicalize. Therefore, the approach of the study was two-fold. First, we explored what types of online jihadist ...

Hate speech and toxic communication online is on the rise. Responses to this issue tend to offer technical (automated) or non-technical (human content moderation) solutions, or see hate speech as a natural product of hateful people. In contrast, this article begins by recognizing platforms as designed environments that support particular practices while discouraging others. In ...

The European Union (EU) is an influential voice in the global debate on regulation of online speech. For that reason, two upcoming regulatory regimes might – in addition to shaping EU digital policy – create global precedents for how to regulate both online speech generally and terrorist content specifically. ...

Algorithms and especially recommendation algorithms play an important role online, most notably on YouTube. Yet, little is known about the network communities that these algorithms form. We analyzed the channel recommendations on YouTube to map the communities that the social network is creating through its algorithms and to test the network for homophily, that is, ...

Online content regulation in Turkey is characterised by extensive removal of material that has resulted in a large number of Turkish and international websites being blocked in recent years. Further, the Turkish government recently introduced a Social Media Bill, implementing a wide range of new regulations and steep penalties for social media companies, which critics ...

This paper combines corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis methodologies in order to investigate the discourses and cyber activism of the British right-wing nationalist party, Britain First. A study of a corpus of texts produced by elite members of the group reveals a racist, xenophobic stance which constructs Islam and Muslims as the radical, dangerous ...