Cyberterrorism: Hype and Reality
September 18, 2023
Chapter “Cyberterrorism: hype and reality” in book: Armistead, Leigh, (ed.) Information warfare: separating hype from reality ...
Terrorism & Internet Governance: Core Issues
September 18, 2023
Both global governance and the sub-set of issues that may be termed ‘internet governance’ are vast and complex issue areas. The difficulties of trying to ‘legislate’ at the global level – efforts that must encompass the economic, cultural, developmental, legal, and political concerns of diverse states and other stakeholders – are further complicated by the ...
Jihadi Video and Auto-Radicalisation: Evidence From an Exploratory YouTube Study
September 18, 2023
Large amounts of jihadi video content on YouTube along with the vast array of relational data that can be gathered opens up innovative avenues for exploration of the support base for political violence. This exploratory study analyses the online supporters of jihad-promoting video content on YouTube, focusing on those posting and commenting upon martyr-promoting material ...
Association between volume and momentum of online searches and real-world collective unrest
September 18, 2023
A fundamental idea from physics is that macroscopic transitions can occur as a result of an escalation in the correlated activity of a many-body system’s constituent particles. Here we apply this idea in an interdisciplinary setting, whereby the particles are individuals, their correlated activity involves online search activity surrounding the topics of social unrest, and ...
Making Friends and Enemies on Social Media: The Case of Gun Policy Organizations
September 18, 2023
The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of interest groups in the formation of online echo chambers and to determine whether interest groups’ use of social media contributes to political polarization. This study used a content analysis of nearly 10,000 tweets (from 2009 to 2014) by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun ...
Von al-Zarqawi bis al-Awlaki: Das Internet als neue Form des radikalen Milieus.
September 18, 2023
Chapter in Stefan Malthaner and Peter Waldmann (eds.) Radikale Milieus: Das soziale Umfeld terroristischer Gruppen. ...
What’s Love Got To Do With It? Framing ‘JihadJane’ in the US Press
September 18, 2023
The purpose of this article is to compare and contrast the US press coverage accorded to female terrorist plotter, Colleen LaRose, with that of two male terrorist plotters in order to test whether assertions in the academic literature regarding media treatment of women terrorists stand up to empirical scrutiny. The authors employed TextSTAT software to ...
Exploring the Form and Function of Dissident Irish Republican Online Discourses
September 18, 2023
This article seeks to contribute to broadening the focus of research in the area of violent online political extremism by examining the use of the internet by dissident Irish Republicans and their supporters. The argument here is not that the internet substitutes face-to-face contacts amongst Irish Republicans, including violent dissidents, nor that it currently plays ...
An Analysis of Interactions Within and Between Extreme Right Communities in Social Media
September 18, 2023
Many extreme right groups have had an online presence for some time through the use of dedicated websites. This has been accompanied by increased activity in social media websites in recent years, which may enable the dissemination of extreme right content to a wider audience. In this paper, we present exploratory analysis of the activity ...
IRA 2.0: Continuing the Long War—Analyzing the Factors Behind Anti-GFA Violence
September 18, 2023
Despite an increasing number of attacks by violent anti-Good Friday Agreement (GFA) Republicans from 2009 there is still relatively little understanding of the nature of these organizations or the likely longevity of their campaign(s). This analysis argues that the current upsurge of violence is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, due to a combination ...