Twitter (X)
Explaining the Emergence of Political Fragmentation on Social Media: The Role of Ideology and Extremism
September 18, 2023This article is a systematic large-scale study of the reasons driving political fragmentation on social media. Making use of a comparative dataset of the Twitter discussion activities of 115 political groups in 26 countries, it shows that groups that are further apart in ideological terms interact less, and that groups that sit at the extremes ...
‘The Baghdadi Net’: How A Network of ISIL-Supporting Accounts Spread Across Twitter
September 18, 2023Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIL) supporters fanned out large amounts of Arabic content across Twitter all through the week in the wake of the news surrounding the death of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. Many accounts were exhibiting strong and multiple signals of automated behavior1, spawning every hour, on the hour, and Institute for ...
What is Gab? A Bastion of Free Speech or an Alt-Right Echo Chamber?
September 18, 2023Over the past few years, a number of new “fringe” communities, like 4chan or certain subreddits, have gained traction on the Web at a rapid pace. However, more often than not, little is known about how they evolve or what kind of activities they attract, despite recent research has shown that they influence how false ...
Elites and foreign actors among the alt-right: The Gab social media platform
September 18, 2023Content regulation and censorship of social media platforms is increasingly discussed by governments and the platforms themselves. To date, there has been little data-driven analysis of the effects of regulated content deemed inappropriate on online user behavior. We therefore compared Twitter — a popular social media platform that occasionally removes content in violation of its ...
Modeling Islamist Extremist Communications on Social Media using Contextual Dimensions: Religion, Ideology, and Hate
September 18, 2023Terror attacks have been linked in part to online extremist content. Although tens of thousands of Islamist extremism supporters consume such content, they are a small fraction relative to peaceful Muslims. The efforts to contain the ever-evolving extremism on social media platforms have remained inadequate and mostly ineffective. Divergent extremist and mainstream contexts challenge machine ...
Understanding the Radical Mind: Identifying Signals to Detect Extremist Content on Twitter
September 18, 2023The Internet and, in particular, Online Social Networks have changed the way that terrorist and extremist groups can influence and radicalise individuals. Recent reports show that the mode of operation of these groups starts by exposing a wide audience to extremist material online, before migrating them to less open online platforms for further radicalization. Thus, ...
How Extreme Is The European Far Right? Investigating Overlaps in the German Far-Right Scene on Twitter
September 18, 2023The aim of the report is to determine the overlaps apparent in the far-right scene on Twitter, and specifically, to ascertain the extent to which different groups on the scene are indeed talking about the same issues in the same way, in spite of apparent differences in tone and underlying ideologies. The authors utilise a ...
Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media
September 18, 2023A revealing and gripping investigation into how social media platforms police what we post online—and the large societal impact of these decisions. Most users want their Twitter feed, Facebook page, and YouTube comments to be free of harassment and porn. Whether faced with “fake news” or livestreamed violence, “content moderators”—who censor or promote user-posted content—have ...
Do Platforms Kill?
September 18, 2023This Article analyzes intermediaries’ civil liability for terror attacks under the anti-terror statutes and other doctrines in tort law. It aims to contribute to the literature in several ways. First, it outlines the way intermediaries aid terrorist activities either willingly or unwittingly. By identifying the role online intermediaries play in terrorist activities, one may lay ...
The Internet Police
September 18, 2023This paper, part of the Legal Perspectives on Tech Series, was commissioned in conjunction with the Congressional Counterterrorism Caucus. ...