Content Analysis

Hateful 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 ...

Branding strategies are becoming increasingly important for terrorist organisations who need to take a more purposeful approach at imbuing aspirational associations to their organisations in order secure recruits and funds in an increasingly competitive environment. The creation and implication of these individual brands are further amplified through the sophisticated harnessing of ICT and digital media, ...

In this paper we present a multimodal approach to categorizing user posts based on their discussion topic. To integrate heterogeneous information extracted from the posts, i.e. text, visual content and the information about user interactions with the online platform, we deploy graph convolutional networks that were recently proven effective in classification tasks on knowledge graphs. ...

This article compares two universes of official Islamic State media that were compiled 18 months apart. It explores the nuances of the group’s worldview and illustrates the extent to which external and internal situational exigencies impacted the Islamic State’s brand during its formative years as caliphate. It finds that the organization’s media infrastructure was about ...

The Online Civil Courage Initiative’s core partner, ISD, has been tracking both positive and negative responses to terror attacks in the UK this year, to understand how to improve counterspeech in the UK. This report contains advice for NGOs working towards challenging hate speech and extremism online with recommendations/suggestions for how they can respond speedily ...

Women participate extensively in armed, Islamist struggle. In recent years, foreign women have travelled from the West to join Daesh. Their participation perplexes policymakers, government officials, and researchers who call attention to the group’s gendered regulation, violence, and widespread use of rape. Consequently, observers often argue that women are deceived by the organisation or seduced ...

This article investigates the social media content of women who are affiliated with the Islamic State. Throughout one year, ninety-three Twitter accounts were tracked to explore the patterns of engagement by pro–Islamic State women online and examine how these patterns illuminate the roles that pro–Islamic State women occupy on social media networks. The study reveals ...

Policy Exchange’s new report provides a comprehensive analysis of the struggle against online jihadist extremism – what we call “the new Netwar”. This issue is vital to UK national security and there is a danger that the blood and treasure we are investing in defeating ISIS in Iraq and Syria will produce little more than ...

This exploratory study examines the narrative space of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Specifically, we developed a methodology to gather, archive, and analyze ISIL’s online presence in social media. Our sample was drawn from transient websites (N = 8308) collected between August 2015 and October 2015. From this pool, we coded ...

The present article examines the relevance of jihadist propaganda as an indicator of the threat from terrorism. To that end, it uses jihadist propaganda output referring to Spain as a case study. It proposes an instrument of measurement based on content analysis, in which the origin, format, content, and distribution method of the materials are ...