Shooting the Messenger: Do Not Blame the Internet for Terrorism
September 18, 2023
The internet clearly matters to terrorists, but online content by itself rarely causes people to carry out terrorist attacks. Responses should therefore not be limited to the mass removal of terrorist content from online platforms. ...
The Threat to the United States from the Islamic State’s Virtual Entrepreneurs
September 18, 2023
Among the most recent evolutions of jihadi terrorist tactics in the West has been the rise of the virtual entrepreneur. The increased use of social media, often paired with applications that ofer the option of encrypted messaging, has enabled members of groups like the Islamic State to make direct and lasting contact with radicalized Americans. ...
A Semantic Graph-Based Approach for Radicalisation Detection on Social Media
September 18, 2023
From its start, the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/ISIS) has been successfully exploiting social media networks, most notoriously Twitter, to promote its propaganda and recruit new members, resulting in thousands of social media users adopting a pro-ISIS stance every year. Automatic identification of pro-ISIS users on social media has, thus, become ...
Internet-Based Radicalization as Enculturation to Violent Deviant Subcultures
September 18, 2023
This work examines the intersections of subcultural theories and radicalization theories from terrorism studies to identify how they may be improved through integration. To date there have been almost no efforts to merge these frameworks, though terrorism shares common characteristics of deviant subcultures. Both are driven by ideologies that are in opposition to that of ...
The Rise of Jihadist Propaganda on Social Networks
September 18, 2023
Using a dataset of over 1.9 million messages posted on Twitter by about 25,000 ISIS members, we explore how ISIS makes use of social media to spread its propaganda and to recruit militants from the Arab world and across the globe. By distinguishing between violence-driven, theological, and sectarian content, we trace the connection between online ...
Terrorist Use of the Internet by the Numbers
September 18, 2023
Public interest and policy debates surrounding the role of the Internet in terrorist activities is increasing. Criminology has said very little on the matter. By using a unique data set of 223 convicted United Kingdom–based terrorists, this article focuses on how they used the Internet in the commission of their crimes. As most samples of ...
Computational Social Science to Gauge Online Extremism
September 18, 2023
Recent terrorist attacks carried out on behalf of ISIS on American and European soil by lone wolf attackers or sleeper cells remind us of the importance of understanding the dynamics of radicalization mediated by social media communication channels. In this paper, we shed light on the social media activity of a group of twenty-five thousand ...
This is Not Your Mother’s Terrorism: Social Media, Online Radicalization and the Practice of Political Jamming
September 18, 2023
It is commonly recognized that social media presents vast new opportunities for terrorist groups seeking to radicalize audiences. However, few scholars have studied the actual mechanisms by which radicalizing messages are delivered to those audiences. Within this paper, the author explores one key aspect of the phenomenon of ‘jihadi cool’ – that is, the rendering ...
Differentiating Act from Ideology: Evidence from Messages For and Against Violent Extremism
September 18, 2023
Although researchers know a great deal about persuasive messages that encourage terrorism, they know far less about persuasive messages that denounce terrorism and little about how these two sides come together. We propose a conceptualization that distinguishes a message’s support for an act from its support for the ideology underlying an act. Our prediction is ...
RiskTrack: A New Approach for Risk Assessment of Radicalisation Based on Social Media Data
September 18, 2023
The RiskTrack project aims to help in the prevention of terrorism through the identification of online radicalisation. In line with the European Union priorities in this matter, this project has been designed to identify and tackle the indicators that raise a red flag about which individuals or communities are being radicalised and recruited to commit ...