On 15 March 2019, Brenton Tarrant destroyed New Zealand’s perception of its low threat terrorist risk. Security sector practitioners interviewed for this study before 15 March spoke about the challenges of performing counter terrorism roles in that low threat environment. Their perceptions revealed a fear that terrorist attacks occurring overseas, would sooner or later occur ...

We present two studies of online ephemerality and anonymity based on the popular discussion board /b/ at 4chan.org: a website with over 7 million users that plays an influential role in Internet culture. Although researchers and practitioners often assume that user identity and data permanence are central tools in the design of online communities, we ...

Reciprocal radicalisation is the theory that extremist organisations are connected and feed on one another’s rhetoric and actions to justify violent escalation. Recent empirical work has suggested that reciprocal radicalisation is a good deal more subtle than is often assumed, and is nuanced by organisational, social and political context. This study seeks to apply the ...

The Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS) continues to use social media as an essential element of its campaign to motivate support. On Twitter, ISIS’ unique ability to leverage unaffiliated sympathizers that simply retweet propaganda has been identified as a primary mechanism in their success in motivating both recruitment and “lone wolf” attacks. The ...

This new investigation from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) delves into the inner workings of a pro-ISIS account network on Facebook, providing a case study of the resilient network dynamics, technological loopholes, and cross-platform activity that allowed a web of accounts to survive and flourish for over three months on a platform which purports ...

The briefing highlights how through its limited content moderation policies Telegram has become a safe space for white supremacists to share and discuss a range of explicit extremist material. Furthermore, it shows that through the many of these Telegram communities have become permissive environments where overt calls for violence and support for terrorism is widespread. ...

This article argues that similarities between jihadism and far-right radicalism are increasing, particularly with regard to the spectacularisation of violence. Spectacularisation means representing and performing violence in the form of a show, for instance through live-streaming, with a renewed emphasis on captivating symbols and much less attention paid to the ideological foundations on which the ...

While a growing body of evidence suggests that the Internet is a key facilitator of violent extremism, research in this area has rarely incorporated former extremists’ experiences with the Internet when they were involved in violent extremism. To address this gap, in-depth interviews were conducted with ten Canadian former right-wing extremists who were involved in ...

Feminist journalists have come to expect special resistance, and even threats, from men’s groups as part of their work as journalists. However, the biggest threats might not originate in men’s groups’ activities. A big threat currently comes from Internet trolls’ responses to individuals who engage in hate‐provoked and hate‐provoking attacks on women as women. This ...

U.K. Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU) Case Officers (COs) are tasked with identifying, and facilitating the removal of material that breaches the Terrorism Act 2006. COs are extensively and repeatedly exposed to material deemed illegal and harmful (including but not restricted to graphic terrorist and non-terrorist material). However, there is little research on ...