Extremist Content
Supreme Court unlikely to ‘break the internet’ over Google, Twitter cases – rather, it is approaching with caution
August 10, 2024VOX-Pol Blog Post. ...
The UK Extreme Right on Twitter: Restricting Access to Extremist Content Online
July 16, 2024VOX-Pol Blog post. ...
Facebook’s policies against extremism: Ten years of struggle for more transparency
September 18, 2023For years, social media, including Facebook, have been criticized for lacking transparency in their community standards, especially in terms of extremist content. Yet, moderation is not an easy task, especially when extreme-right actors use content strategies that shift the Overton window (i.e., the range of ideas acceptable in public discourse) rightward. In a self-proclaimed search ...
A Safe Space to Hate: White Supremacist Mobilisation on Telegram
September 18, 2023The briefing highlights how through its limited content moderation policies Telegram has become a safe space for white supremacists to share and discuss a range of explicit extremist material. Furthermore, it shows that through the many of these Telegram communities have become permissive environments where overt calls for violence and support for terrorism is widespread. ...
Cyber-routines, Political Attitudes, and Exposure to Violence-Advocating Online Extremism
September 18, 2023The Internet’s relatively unfettered transmission of information risks exposing individuals to extremist content. Using online survey data (N = 768) of American youth and young adults, we examine factors that bring individuals into contact with online material advocating violence. Combining aspects of social structure-social learning theory with insights from routine activity theory, we find that ...
Application Of Recurrent Neural Networks In Toxic Comment Classification
September 18, 2023Moderators of online discussion forums often struggle with controlling extremist comments on their platforms. To help provide an efficient and accurate tool to detect online toxicity, we apply word2vec’s Skip-Gram embedding vectors, Recurrent Neural Network models like Bidirectional Long Short-term Memory to tackle a toxic comment classification problem with a labeled dataset from Wikipedia Talk ...
A Comparative Approach To Social Media Extreme Speech: Online Hate Speech As Media Commentary
September 18, 2023By exploring lessons learned from Ethiopia and Finland, this article challenges two assumptions about online hate speech research. First, it challenges the assumption that the best way to understand controversial concepts such as online hate speech is to determine how closely they represent or mirror some underlying set of facts or state of affairs online ...
Mapping The Jihadist Information Ecosystem
September 18, 2023Online disruption efforts generally aim to reduce the availability of jihadist content. Yet, the speed and agility of jihadist movements online – a multiplatform approach which a co-author of this paper has previously described as a ‘swarmcast’ – has allowed groups to evolve in response to disruption efforts and find new ways to distribute content. This ...