Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online: Results of the 5th monitoring exercise
September 18, 2023
To prevent and counter the spread of illegal hate speech online, in May 2016, the Commission agreed with Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube a “Code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech online”. The implementation of the Code of Conduct is evaluated through a regular monitoring exercise set up in collaboration with a network of ...
Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online: Progress 2016-2019
September 18, 2023
To prevent and counter the spread of illegal hate speech online, in May 2016, the Commission agreed with Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube a “Code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech online”. The implementation of the Code of Conduct is evaluated through a regular monitoring exercise set up in collaboration with a network of ...
Considering the Ethics of Big Data Research: A Case of Twitter and ISIS/ISIL
September 18, 2023
This is a formal commentary, responding to Matthew Curran Benigni, Kenneth Joseph, and Kathleen Carley’s contribution, “Online extremism and the communities that sustain it: Detecting the ISIS supporting community on Twitter”. This brief review reflects on the ethics of big data research methodologies, and how novel methods complicate long-standing principles of research ethics. Specifically, the ...
The Communicative Constitution of Hate Organizations Online: A Semantic Network Analysis of “Make America Great Again”
September 18, 2023
In the context of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, President Donald Trump’s use of Twitter to connect with followers and supporters created unprecedented access to Trump’s online political campaign. In using the campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again” (or its acronym “MAGA”), Trump communicatively organized and controlled media systems by offering his followers an opportunity ...
Country-Level Report on Drivers of Self-Radicalisation and Digital Sociability
September 18, 2023
In this report, we present an empirical study from Twitter on how Islamist extremists and right wing extremists are active on Twitter. Our study was based on ethnographic, automatic text and network analyses of data from German female and male Twitter accounts. ...
#Hamas: A Thematic Exploration of Hamas’s English-Language Twitter
September 18, 2023
As the debate on whether Hamas should be designated a terrorist organization intensifies across Europe and North America, policymakers and practitioners seek to identify the core principles that unify the group and its ideology. This paper contributes to this discussion by examining how Hamas uses Twitter to frame its narrative to English-speakers around the world. ...
“Pine Tree” Twitter and the Shifting Ideological Foundations of Eco-Extremism
September 18, 2023
Eco-fascism is emerging at both the highest levels of state and the lowest reaches of the political underworld. However, this may be only part of a much larger, more idealogically complex, emerging extremist threat. The climate crisis–and the crisis of global financial capitalism from which it is inextricable–may yet be driving a realignment of extremist ...
Antisemitism on Twitter: Collective efficacy and the role of community organisations in challenging online hate speech
September 18, 2023
In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study of online antagonistic content related to Jewish identity posted on Twitter between October 2015 and October 2016 by UK-based users. We trained a scalable supervised machine learning classifier to identify antisemitic content to reveal patterns of online antisemitism perpetration at the source. We built statistical models to ...
Weaponizing white thymos: flows of rage in the online audiences of the alt-right
September 18, 2023
The alt-right is a growing radical right-wing network that is particularly effective at mobilizing emotion through digital communications. Introducing ‘white thymos’ as a framework to theorize the role of rage, anger, and indignation in alt-right communications, this study argues that emotive communication connects alt-right users and mobilizes white thymos to the benefit of populist radical ...
Explaining the Emergence of Political Fragmentation on Social Media: The Role of Ideology and Extremism
September 18, 2023
This 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 ...