Participant Recruitment through Social Media: Lessons Learned from a Qualitative Radicalization Study Using Facebook
September 18, 2023
Social media are useful facilitators when recruiting hidden populations for research. In our research on youth and radicalization, we were able to find and contact young people with extreme ideals through Facebook. In this article, we discuss our experiences using Facebook as a tool for finding respondents who do not trust researchers. Facebook helped us ...
Cyberspace, Terrorism and International Law
September 18, 2023
Governments have long worried about terrorists using the Internet to launch cyberattacks, spread propaganda, recruit and radicalise individuals and raise funds. However, the Islamic State’s exploitation of social media has caused a crisis and generated questions about international law’s role in addressing terrorism in cyberspace. This article analyzes international law in connection with potential terrorist ...
Women’s Connectivity in Extreme Networks
September 18, 2023
A popular stereotype is that women will play more minor roles than men as environments become more dangerous and aggressive. Our analysis of new longitudinal data sets from offline and online operational networks [for example, ISIS (Islamic State)] shows that although men dominate numerically, women emerge with superior network connectivity that can benefit the underlying ...
Literature Review: The Impact of Digital Communications Technology on Radicalisation and Recruitment
September 18, 2023
This literature review seeks to reorient the discourse on radicalization to consider the connection between communication technology and violent extremism. By interrogating three central questions vexing policy-makers, law enforcement officials and academics, this review moves away from a monolithic understanding of the internet and showcases the opportunities afforded by different communications technologies within the context ...
Isis and the Internet
September 18, 2023
Documentary: Isis and The Internet premieres Friday April 1st at 10pm ET on MSNBC. ...
Online Social Media in the Syria Conflict: Encompassing the Extremes and the In-Betweens
September 18, 2023
The Syria conflict has been described as the most socially mediated in history, with online social media playing a particularly important role. At the same time, the everchanging landscape of the conflict leads to difficulties in applying analytical approaches taken by other studies of online political activism. Therefore, in this paper, we use an approach ...
Social media and counterterrorism strategy
September 18, 2023
With the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the issue of domestic radicalisation has taken on renewed significance for Western democracies. In particular, attention has been drawn to the potency of ISIS engagement on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Several governments have emphasised the importance of online programs aimed at ...
Radical Reddits: into the Minds of Online Radicalised Communities.
September 18, 2023
The online domain potentially provides research with a vast body of data. The big quest within contemporary research is to make sense of all this data. A possibility to handle such data is by combining methods from the fields of new media and linguistics. Several studies have sought to understand how radicalism online comes to ...
Countering Insurgency in Kashmir: The Cyber Dimension
September 18, 2023
Countering the militancy in Kashmir has become a highly challenging task due to the exploitation of new information and communication technology by insurgent groups. The battlefield is now a multidimensional one, encompassing both physical territory and cyberspace. The overall capabilities of insurgents have been enhanced by tools in cyberspace that are inexpensive, ever more sophisticated, ...
Quantifying Salient Concepts Discussed in Social Media Content: A Case Study using Twitter Content Written by Radicalized Youth
September 18, 2023
Social Media has become an important source for information about people and real-world events. Its importance is driven largely by the enormous number of people generating and updating content in Social Media platforms. In this report, we measure the extent to which we can accurately measure the salience of topics/concepts that might be of interest ...