Content Analysis

The jihadist groups AQAP, ISIS, and the Taliban have all produced glossy English magazines designed to influence Western sympathizers. We examine these magazines empirically with respect to models of the intensity of informative, imaginative, deceptive, jihadist, and gamification language. This allows their success to be estimated and their similarities and differences to be exposed. We ...

The article describes the research network “Analysis of extremist aspirations in social networks (X-SONAR)” funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The network investigates extremist interaction and escalation dynamics in social online networks and their relevance for criminally relevant radicalization processes, such as in the planning and execution of extremist acts of ...

This project examines the uses of social media for policing domestic extremism and disorder in the UK. The collection and analysis of social media data for the purposes of policing forms part of a broader shift from ‘reactive’ to ‘proactive’ forms of governance in which state bodies engage in big data analysis to predict, preempt ...

The level of influence and interference by Russian-linked social media trying to engineer social division in the UK, including through Russian Twitter accounts, is considerably more extensive than has been reported to date. ...

Governments and companies are turning to automated tools to make sense of what people post on social media, for everything ranging from hate speech detection to law enforcement investigations. Policymakers routinely call for social media companies to identify and take down hate speech, terrorist propaganda, harassment, “fake news” or disinformation, and other forms of problematic ...

Social media platforms have recently seen an increase in the occurrence of hate speech discourse which has led to calls for improved detection methods. Most of these rely on annotated data, keywords, and a classification technique. While this approach provides good coverage, it can fall short when dealing with new terms produced by online extremist ...

Al Qaeda is today a fragmented organization, and its strategic communication efforts now focus largely on recruiting individuals in the West to carry out “individual jihad” in their home countries. One Al Qaeda–affiliated publication, Inspire, represents an unusual use of the digital magazine format and content for recruitment. This study examines the content and design ...

This article analyses Dabiq magazine to explore the strategic logic of Islamic State (IS) appeals to English-speaking Muslims. It offers the field a conceptual framework through which to analyse IS’s communications strategy and a top-down empirical study of Dabiq’s contents. This paper argues that Dabiq appeals to its audiences by strategically designing in-group identity, Other, ...

The edition of Dabiq, the online magazine of the Islamic State (IS), that followed the horrific Paris attacks (130 dead) glorified the work of what it called the “eight knights” who carried out the killings. It rejoiced, too, in the downing of a Russian airliner (224 dead), picturing the homemade bomb it said caused the ...

Violent Jihadist movements have increasingly produced online English language magazines in order to encourage young Muslims into terrorism. This article argues that sociological approaches to the study of these magazines should engage with theories of political myth, understood as the collective “work” on dramatic and figurative narratives which provide significance to the political conditions of ...