Social media and radicalisation of university students in Bangladesh
September 18, 2023
While there is growing research on radicalisation and its countermeasures, in the context of Bangladesh, there is a paucity of academic studies on the role of social media in the radicalisation of university students. This research addresses the gap by using survey data to examine the online behaviour and social media use of the university-going ...
Online influence, offline violence: language use on YouTube surrounding the ‘Unite the Right’ rally
September 18, 2023
The media frequently describes the 2017 Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ rally as a turning point for the alt-right and white supremacist movements. Social movement theory suggests that the media attention and public discourse concerning the rally may have engendered changes in social identity performance and visibility of the alt-right, but this has yet to be ...
Status quo und Massnahmen zu rassistischer Hassrede im Internet: Übersicht und Empfehlungen
September 18, 2023
Rassistische Hassrede im Internet: Wie soll die Schweiz in Zukunft damit umgehen? Der vorliegende Bericht, welchen die Fachstelle für Rassismusbekämpfung (FRB) in Auftrag gegeben hat, liefert dazu einen Beitrag. Er beinhaltet eine kritische Zusammenfassung der Datenlage, einen Einblick in die digitale Umwelt und egünstigenden Kommunikationsbedingungen rassistischer Online-Hassrede sowie einen Überblick zu bestehenden Gegenmassnahmen in der ...
Stop the virus of disinformation: the risk of malicious use of social media during COVID-19 and the technology options to fight it
September 18, 2023
This report describes how terrorist, violent extremist and organized criminal groups are trying to take advantage of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic to expand their activities and jeopardize the efficacy and credibility of response measures by governments. ...
Decoding Hate: Using Experimental Text Analysis to Classify Terrorist Content
September 18, 2023
This paper uses automated text analysis – the process by which unstructured text is extracted, organised and processed into a meaningful format – to develop tools capable of analysing Islamic State (IS) propaganda at scale. Although we have used a static archive of IS material, the underlying principle is that these techniques can be deployed ...
An Exploration of the Involuntary Celibate (Incel) Subculture Online
September 18, 2023
Incels, a portmanteau of the term involuntary celibates, operate in online communities to discuss difficulties in attaining sexual relationships. Past reports have found that multiple elements of the incel culture are misogynistic and favorable towards violence. Further, several violent incidents have been linked to this community, which suggests that incel communities may resemble other ideologically ...
Hiding hate speech: political moderation on Facebook
September 18, 2023
Facebook facilitates more extensive dialogue between citizens and politicians. However, communicating via Facebook has also put pressure on political actors to administrate and moderate online debates in order to deal with uncivil comments. Based on a platform analysis of Facebook’s comment moderation functions and interviews with eight political parties’ communication advisors, this study explored how ...
Regulating Social Media: The Fight Over Section 230 — and Beyond
September 18, 2023
There are increasing calls to curtail or revoke Section 230, a 1996 law that protects internet companies from most lawsuits related to user-generated content. Critics of Section 230 say it discourages vigilant self-regulation. Proponents counter that the law has fostered free expression and innovation. Our report concludes that Section 230 ought to be preserved but ...
Uniting the far right: how the far-right extremist, New Right, and populist frames overlap on Twitter – a German case study
September 18, 2023
Recent elections in Europe have demonstrated a steady rise in the success of right-wing populist parties. While advancing an anti-immigration agenda, these parties have been adamant to distance themselves from ‘right-wing extremism’. This article analyses a sample of tweets collected from the Twitter accounts of the German AfD, Identitarian Movement and the Autonomous Nationalists by ...
The Radicalization Risks Of GPT-3 And Advanced Neural Language Models
September 18, 2023
In 2020, OpenAI developed GPT-3, a neural language model that is capable of sophisticated natural language generation and completion of tasks like classification, question-answering, and summarization. While OpenAI has not opensourced the model’s code or pre-trained weights at the time of writing, it has built an API to experiment with the model’s capacity. The Center ...