Big Data
‘Terrorism Informatics’ Part IV: Predicting Extremist Behaviour
August 8, 2024VOX-Pol Blog Post. ...
‘Terrorism Informatics’ Part II: Identifying Extremist Networks
August 8, 2024VOX-Pol Blog Post. ...
The Ontogeny of Online Hate Speech: Do Social Media Platforms Drive Increased Hate or Reflect Existing Prejudices?
September 18, 2023Hate speech is a growing concern online, with minorities and vulnerable groups increasingly targeted with extreme denigration and hostility. Why users express hate speech on social media is unclear. This study explores how this hate speech develops on both mainstream and fringe social media platforms; Facebook and Gab. We investigate whether users seek out hostile ...
Antisemitism on Twitter: Collective efficacy and the role of community organisations in challenging online hate speech
September 18, 2023In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study of online antagonistic content related to Jewish identity posted on Twitter between October 2015 and October 2016 by UK-based users. We trained a scalable supervised machine learning classifier to identify antisemitic content to reveal patterns of online antisemitism perpetration at the source. We built statistical models to ...
Artificial or Human: A New Era of Counterterrorism Intelligence?
September 18, 2023A new revolution has begun in counterterrorism—the Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution. The AI revolution has had a significant impact on many areas of security and intelligence. The use of AI and big data in general, and in the field of intelligence and counterterrorism in particular, has led to intense debates between supporters of the continuation ...
Detection Of Jihadism In Social Networks Using Big Data
September 18, 2023Social networks are being used by terrorist organizations to distribute messages with the intention of influencing people and recruiting new members. The research presented in this paper focuses on the analysis of Twitter messages to detect the leaders orchestrating terrorist networks and their followers. A big data architecture is proposed to analyze messages in real ...
Studying Jihadists on Social Media: A Critique of Data Collection Methodologies
September 18, 2023In this article, we propose a general model of data collection from social media, in the context of terrorism research, focusing on recent studies of jihadists. By analyzing Twitter data collection methods in the existing research, we show that the methods used are prone to sampling biases, and that the sampled datasets are not sufficiently ...
‘Like Sheep Among Wolves’: Characterizing Hateful Users on Twitter
September 18, 2023Hateful speech in Online Social Networks (OSNs) is a key challenge for companies and governments, as it impacts users and advertisers, and as several countries have strict legislation against the practice. This has motivated work on detecting and characterizing the phenomenon in tweets, social media posts and comments. However, these approaches face several shortcomings due ...