Social Media

The latest Digital Citizens Alliance investigation exposes the fallacy that much, if anything, has changed. Partnering with the Global Intellectual Property Enforcement Center (GIPEC), Digital Citizens has reviewed dozens of examples of how terrorist organizations continue to rely on digital platforms such as Google, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram to promote hate speech and recruit. What ...

Until his death in a U.S. drone strike in August 2015, Junaid Hussain was the Islamic State’s most prolific Englishlanguage social media propagandist, working to incite and guide sympathizers in the United Kingdom, United States, and beyond to launch terrorist attacks. Before joining the jihad in Syria, Hussain was part of a hacking collective in ...

Online social media platforms such as Twitter have been found to be misused by extremist groups, including Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), who attract and recruit social media users. To prevent their influence from expanding in the online social media platforms, it is required to understand the online behaviors of these extremist group ...

This paper investigates the link between social media and hate crime using hand-collected data from Facebook and Twitter. We study the case of Germany, where the recently emerged right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has developed a major social media presence. Using a difference-in-differences design, we show that right-wing anti-refugee sentiment on Facebook predicts violent ...

Why do young Muslim women radicalize and undertake high-risk political behaviors, and what factors influence their sociopolitical transformation? The process of radicalization happens because of individual, social, and political dynamics, and is facilitated by the availability of computer-mediated communication. Some young Muslim women keep detailed records of their radicalization process via social media, which we ...

The study examines three anonymous sharing portals employed strategically by the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) to achieve its political ends. This study argues that anonymous sharing portals such as Sendvid.com, Justpast.it, and Dump.to have been instrumental in allowing individual jihadists to generate content, disseminate propaganda and communicate freely while routing around filtering ...

This report outlines the results of a programme trialling a methodology for identifying individuals who are demonstrating signs of radicalisation on social media, and engaging these individuals in direct, personalised and private ‘counter-conversations’ for the purpose of de-radicalisation from extremist ideology and disengagement from extremist movements. This is the first programme globally which has trialled ...

Operations involving the capture, processing, and transmission of terrorist events, campaigns, or images produce effects well beyond the representational/informational functions of media. This article examines several unspoken effects involved in the mediation of terrorism. We analyze the extent to which several mechanisms and operations of western media may be complicit in, if not fundamental to, ...

The Online Civil Courage Initiative’s core partner, ISD, has been tracking both positive and negative responses to terror attacks in the UK this year, to understand how to improve counterspeech in the UK. This report contains advice for NGOs working towards challenging hate speech and extremism online with recommendations/suggestions for how they can respond speedily ...

This doctoral thesis takes the reader into elements of the strategy of using modern communication as well the advocated monopoly of truth by jihadist groups world wide. ...