Video Games, Terrorism, and ISIS’s Jihad 3.0
September 18, 2023
This study discusses different media strategies followed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In particular, the study attempts to understand the way ISIS’s video game that is called “Salil al-Sawarem” (The Clanging of the Swords) has been received by the online Arab public. The article argues that the goal behind making and ...
“Breivik is my Hero”: the Dystopian World of Extreme Right Youth on the Internet
September 18, 2023
The extreme right is currently on the rise throughout Europe, making use of the Continent’s economic and social problems to bolster its cause. It is also making increasing use of the Internet to spread its message and build a virtual world that it hopes will one day be reflected in reality. Until now the bulk ...
Combatting The Islamic State’s Digital Dominance: Revitalizing U.S. Communication Strategy
September 18, 2023
From London to Ontario to Northern Virginia and beyond, young men and women have felt compelled to find belonging in a community ideologically grounded in opposition to the modern world—a community that utilizes violence as a solution to its grievances. Whether the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (IS) ultimately proves to be a temporary phenomenon or not, ...
An Approach for Dynamic Identification of Online Radicalization in Social Networks
September 18, 2023
The Online Social Network (OSN) has evolved as a popular platform enabling rich topic-centric interactions and serving as a medium to facilitate online radicalization (Behr et al. 2013). Keeping in view the growing need of uncovering online radicalization, we focus on the information network of Twitter and present an approach for identifying dynamic communities, which ...
Measuring Radicalization in Online Social Networks Using Markov Chains
September 18, 2023
The growing penetration of online social networks (OSNs) has emerged as a strong operational tool for spreading online radicalization by adding intensity and acceleration to the operations of radical groups. The efficiency of ways and methods proposed to measure the dynamics of radicalization are limited by the availability of models for modeling the intricacies of ...
Online Radicalisation: The Net or the Netizen?
September 18, 2023
Radicalisation has gained some unusual prominence in the academic circles; maintaining a generic existence not only in the political sector. And with the advent of the Information Communication Technology (ICT), radicalisation has begun to have some virtual dimension even in the remotest of human communities. This study seeks to mobilise a universal awareness on the ...
From al-Zarqawi to al-Awlaki: The Emergence and Development of an Online Radical Milieu
September 18, 2023
Radical milieus have been described as specific social environ¬ments whose culture, narratives, and symbols shape both individuals and groups, and the social networks and relationships out of which those individuals and groups develop and emerge. Researcher Peter Waldmann and his co-authors attribute distinct and independent qualities to these environments, portraying them as social entities in ...
Echo Chambers and Online Radicalism: Assessing the Internet’s Complicity in Violent Extremism
September 18, 2023
This article considers claims made by various authors that the use of filtering and recommendation technology on the Internet can deprive certain communities of feedback, and instead amplify groups’ viewpoints, leading to polarization of opinion across communities, and increases in extremism. The ‘echo chamber’ arguments of Cass Sunstein are taken as representative of this point ...
Cyber Hate Speech on Twitter: An Application of Machine Classification and Statistical Modeling for Policy and Decision Making
September 18, 2023
The use of “Big Data” in policy and decision making is a current topic of debate. The 2013 murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich, London, UK led to an extensive public reaction on social media, providing the opportunity to study the spread of online hate speech (cyber hate) on Twitter. Human annotated Twitter data ...
Greetings from the cybercaliphate: some notes on homeland insecurity
September 18, 2023
One of the paradoxical effects of the 7 July bombings in London was to expose the ambivalence in the British government’s attempt to wage war on terror by forcefully prosecuting war against those who resort to jihad abroad, actively participating in coalitions of the willing whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, while affording some of Islamism’s ...