From Tweeter to Terrorist: Combatting Online Propaganda When Jihad Goes Viral
September 18, 2023
From Tweeter to Terrorist: Combatting Online Propaganda When Jihad Goes Viral ...
Terrorist Communications: Are Facebook, Twitter, and Google Responsible for the Islamic State’s Actions?
September 18, 2023
Four of the world’s largest Internet companies pledged to monitor, combat, and prevent terrorists from using their social media platforms to conduct operations in May 2016. One month later, Twitter, Facebook, and Google were sued for deaths caused by the Islamic State in 2015, and their alleged allowance and facilitation of terrorist communication. A growing ...
Tweeting Terror Live: Al-Shabaab’s Use of Twitter during the Westgate Attack and Implications for Counterterrorism Communications
September 18, 2023
This article will analyze the motivations for and use of live-tweets during a terrorist attack. The employment of live-tweets offers terrorist groups the opportunity to adopt the role of a media outlet to exploit the advantages of live coverage typically exercised by mainstream media. This poses a unique challenge to policy makers and international media ...
A Snapshot of the Syrian Jihadi Online Ecology: Differential Disruption, Community Strength, and Preferred Other Platforms
September 18, 2023
This article contributes to the growing literature on extremist and terrorist online ecologies and approaches to snapshotting these. It opens by measuring Twitter’s differential disruption of so-called “Islamic State” versus other jihadi parties to the Syria conflict, showing that while Twitter became increasingly inhospitable to IS in 2017 and 2018, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and Ahrar ...
Cross-national level report on digital sociability and drivers of self-radicalisation in Europe
September 18, 2023
In this report, we present an empirical cross-national study of supporters of right-wing extremists’ (RWE) and Islamist extremists’ (ISE) activities and interactions on Twitter. The study is based on ethnographic and automatic text and network analyses of data from Belgian, British, Dutch, French, German, Greek and Norwegian female and male Twitter accounts. ...
A “Europe des Nations”: far right imaginative geographies and the politicization of cultural crisis on Twitter in Western Europe
September 18, 2023
Contestation over European integration has been widely studied in the rhetoric of parties, leaders, and movements on the far right in a variety of media. Focusing on Twitter use by far right actors in Western Europe, we apply corpus-aided discourse analysis to explore how imaginative geographies are used to politicize Europe among their digital publics. ...
Uniting the far right: how the far-right extremist, New Right, and populist frames overlap on Twitter – a German case study
September 18, 2023
Recent elections in Europe have demonstrated a steady rise in the success of right-wing populist parties. While advancing an anti-immigration agenda, these parties have been adamant to distance themselves from ‘right-wing extremism’. This article analyses a sample of tweets collected from the Twitter accounts of the German AfD, Identitarian Movement and the Autonomous Nationalists by ...
Digitale Worte – Analoge Taten: Eine fallgestützte Analyse nach außen und nach innen kommunizierter Ideologie einer rechtsextremen Gruppierung
September 18, 2023
In diesem Beitrag werden auf Basis von staatsanwaltschaftlichen Verfahrensakten, Daten der Programmierschnittstelle von Twitter (API) und frei zugänglichen Online-Inhalten Konstitutions- und Kommunikationsdynamiken einer rechtsextremistischen Gruppierung analysiert, von der mehrere Mitglieder 2014 wegen der Bildung einer kriminellen Vereinigung verurteilt wurden. Es wird rekonstruiert und analysiert, wie die jungen Erwachsenen über verschiedene Kommunikationskanäle innerhalb ihrer Gruppe und ...
Mainstreaming white supremacy: a twitter analysis of the American ‘Alt-Right’
September 18, 2023
In this paper, I analyze how the so called ‘alt-right’ is using Twitter to mainstream its politics. Understanding alt-right mainstreaming is important because the movement has embraced a Gramscian view of politics that believes cultural change (e.g. normalizing unpopular ideas) must precede institutional change (e.g. fielding candidates for office). To conduct my analysis I created ...
Hate Speech Detection on Twitter: Feature Engineering v.s. Feature Selection
September 18, 2023
The increasing presence of hate speech on social media has drawn significant investment from governments, companies, and empirical research. Existing methods typically use a supervised text classification approach that depends on carefully engineered features. However, it is unclear if these features contribute equally to the performance of such methods. We conduct a feature selection analysis ...