The Importance of Web 2.0 for Jihad 3.0: Female Jihadists Coming to Grips with Religious Violence on Facebook
September 18, 2023
The Jihadist phenomenon has a privileged space in Web 2.0 where contents can be created, networks can be global and all exchanges of information have significance. The emergent Jihadist organizations have been profiting from these digital communication features to enlarge, diversify and connect with their audience. On the one side, the virtual framing of Jihad ...
The Virtual Caliphate: ISIS’s Information Warfare
September 18, 2023
ISIS will likely maintain the capacity to align its military and information operations (IO) in the coming years. Continuing conflicts and the plodding effort to address the underlying conditions where it has taken root will likely help ISIS retain physical sanctuary and command and control capability in Iraq, Syria, and North Africa, even if it ...
Data-Driven System Identification of the Social Network Dynamics in Online Postings of an Extremist Group
September 18, 2023
Terrorism research has begun to focus on the issue of radicalization, or the acceptance of ideological belief systems that lead toward violence. There has been particular attention paid to the role of the Internet in the exposure to and promotion of radical ideas. There is, however, minimal work that attempts to model the ways that ...
Extremism on the Internet; The Fight Against Online Radicalisation Starts Offline
September 18, 2023
Counter-narratives are often claimed to be the ingenuous solution for the prevention of extremism and radicalisation. They are intended to dismantle extremism’s propaganda or create positive alternatives to its communities. But the effect is dubious and may, at worst, lead to the opposite result. Therefore, education and critical thinking are the best form of prevention. ...
Avoid the Pitfalls of Counter-Narratives
September 18, 2023
Counter-narratives and campaigns promoting normality, are often highlighted as universal means against online propaganda from militant movements. However, such campaigns are driven by a number of unfortunate assumptions and are difficult to apply in practice. ...
Measuring Online Affects in a White Supremacy Forum
September 18, 2023
Since the inception of the World Wide Web, security agencies, researchers, and analysts have focused much of their attention on the sentiment found on hate-inspired web-forums. Here, one of their goals has been to detect and measure users’ affects that are expressed in the forums as well as identify how users’ affects change over time. ...
Identifying individuals at risk of being radicalised via the internet
September 18, 2023
In an effort to better understand the risk of individuals being radicalised via the internet, this paper re-examines the phenomenon of online radicalisation by focusing on four considerations of interest: individual, online environment, interactions between individual and the online environment, and protective elements. A key premise of the discussion presented is that the different theoretical ...
Women and Violent Radicalization
September 18, 2023
As myths, stereotypes and media representations circulate about the several hundred Western women who have gone to Syria and joined the jihadists, it seems to us essential to try to understand the motives and explanatory factors behind the radicalization of these girls and women. What mechanisms and processes lead them to become radicalized and to ...
“On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog”: The Online Risk Assessment of Violent Extremists
September 18, 2023
Online behaviour can provide a unique window from which we can glean intent. From an intelligence standpoint it provides an important source of open-source information. However, making inference of intent from online activity is inherently difficult. Yet elsewhere progress is being made in incorporating information online into decisions regarding risk and offender prioritisation. This chapter ...
Digital Citizens: Countering Extremism Online
September 18, 2023
The last half century has witnessed a burgeoning information revolution that has transformed our societies beyond recognition. The development of sophisticated computing, the technological reorientation of vast segments of the global workforce, the invention of the internet and most recently the proliferation of social media technology has radically changed the ways we work, live, develop ...