Post Type Description
The Online Life of a Modern Terrorist: Anders Behring Breivik’s Use of the Internet
May 9, 2024VOX-Pol Blog post. ...
Blocking Islamic State’s Online Propaganda is the Wrong Answer to the Wrong Problem
May 9, 2024VOX-Pol Blog post. ...
AI Extremism: Technology, Tactics, Actors
April 25, 2024Over the past decade, two major phenomena have developed in the digital realm. On the one hand, extremism has grown massively on the Internet, with sprawling online ecosystems hosting a wide range of radical subcultures and communities associated with both ‘stochastic terrorism’ and the ‘mainstreaming of extremism’. On the other hand, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has ...
Online Jihadist Propaganda Dissemination Strategies
March 5, 2024It is well established that jihadist groups and their supporters post URLs on online platforms to outlink to items of propaganda stored on other platforms. Industry initiatives – such as Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism’s inclusion of URLs in its hash-sharing database, and Tech Against Terrorism’s Terrorist Content Analytics Platform – have sought to ...
The Last Twitter Census
January 23, 2024This report compares two large random samples of Twitter accounts that tweet in English: one taken just before Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022, and one taken three months later, in January 2023. It also examines several related datasets collected during the period following the acquisition, a period in which, the study found, new ...
The effects of social media on domestic terrorism
January 13, 2024Much qualitative research has drawn an association between social media and domestic terrorism, with the studies reaching different conclusions. However, few empirical studies have evaluated whether the surge in social media participation affects domestic terrorist events. Controlling for common explanations in the literature, we conduct a cross-national, time-series analysis of up to 151 countries from ...
A community resilience linguistic framework for risk assessment: using second order moral foundations and emotion on social media
January 13, 2024Mainstream risk assessment frameworks such as TRAP-18, ERG22+, VERA-2R, and RADAR largely use Structured Professional Judgement to map individuals against four critical factors; ideology, affiliation, grievance, and moral emotions. However, the growing use of online communication platforms by extremists presents a series of opportunities to complement or extend existing risk assessment frameworks. Here, we examine ...