Social Media

Terrorist groups have proved in recent years that they are particularly adept at utilizing the Internet and social media to facilitate their activities, including incitement to commit a terrorist act, radicalization to violence, recruitment, training, planning, collection of information, communication, preparation, financing and execution of attacks. In addition to Al-Qaida, one terrorist entity that has ...

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 ...

In this study, and with a view to extending upon existing findings on the effects of general violent media on violent cognitions, we experimentally measured the relationship between exposure to extremist propaganda and violent cognitions. Our results countered our hypotheses and the wider findings of violent media and aggression that exposure to violent stimuli increases ...

Popular tech companies—Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others—have strongly protected free speech online, a policy widely associated with the legal norms of the United States. American tech companies, however, operate globally, and their platforms are subject to regulation by the European Union, whose member states offer less protection to expression than does the United States. European ...

Online platforms are used extensively as a propaganda tool to convince young people to support the various groups fighting in Iraq and Syria. Many individuals outside of the conflict partake in propaganda efforts on social media, using their profiles to provide electronic support to ISIS and other extremist groups. An analysis of various profiles indicates ...

The 8th Euromed Survey conducted by the European Institute of the Mediterranean touches upon a number of important and complex issues related to violent extremism in the EuroMediterranean region, including the question of the context and drivers through which violent extremism can prosper. Echoing some of the results, this article looks into propaganda as a ...

This article’s objective is to categorize potential jihadists in Europe and provide an overview of contemporary methods for their recruitment. Taking into account the ubiquity of the Internet and social networking platforms, and the fact that younger generations are spending an ever increasing amount of time using contemporary communication technology, this article focuses on those ...

Steganography is the art and science of hiding the fact that communication is taking place by hiding information in other information’ (Johnson). According to nameless “U.S. officials and experts” and “U.S. and foreign officials,” terrorist groups are “hiding maps and photographs of terrorist targets and posting instructions for terrorist activities on sports chat rooms, pornographic ...

This paper uses a multimodal mixed methods approach for exploring general recontextualisation patterns of violent extremist images in online media. Specifically, the paper reports on the preliminary findings of a preliminary study which investigates various patterns in the reuse of images which appear in ISIS’s official propaganda magazines Dabiq and Rumiyah by others across various ...