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Analysing labels, associations, and sentiments in Twitter on the Abu Sayyaf kidnapping of Viktor Okonek
View Abstract
This article investigates Twitter data related to the kidnapping case of two German nationals in the southern region of the Philippines by the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG). It explores perceptions of the ASG, along with associated organizations and sentiments indicated in the tweets together with statistically significant relationships. Findings revealed that: “Rebel” and “Militant” were the most frequently used labels for the ASG; a majority of the tweets contained sentiments that assess threats such as abduction and kidnapping of hostages; and almost half contained words that indicate negotiation or concession to the demands of the captors. Logistic regression analyses on “Rebel” and “Islamist” revealed positive coefficients for these sentiments used as predictors. This meant that people who assessed threats and expressed sentiments that responders should concede to the captors’ demands were more likely to use the “Rebel” or “Islamist” labels. Rather than the two longstanding dominant narratives of the ASG as terrorists and criminals, the emerging rebel and militant labels suggest a more domestically and politically sensitive Twitter commentary than is represented in the work of the Al-Qaeda-centric paradigm exponents. These findings, along with the complex associated political and policy contexts and implications, are discussed in this article.
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2017 |
Reyes, J.A.L. and Smith, T. |
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Beating ISIS in the Digitial Space: Focus Testing ISIS Defector Counter-Narrative Videos with American College Students
View Abstract
ISIS recruits on a 24/7 basis in over 21 languages over the Internet using videos, memes, tweets and other social media postings and swarming in on anyone that retweets, likes or endorses their materials to try to seduce them into the group. Their unprecedented social media drive has resulted in over 30,000 foreign fighters from more than 100 countries migrating to Syria and Iraq. ISIS recruitment in the U.S. is for the most part Internet based and has resulted in the actual and attempted recruitment of over 100 individuals residing in the U.S. with over 200 Americans traveling to Syria to join terrorist groups. To date very little counter-narrative material exists and most of it is cognitive versus emotionally impactful. The International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE) Breaking the ISIS Brand – the ISIS Defectors Interviews Project has managed to collect 43 ISIS defector interviews and thus far produce two video clips of ISIS defectors denouncing the group which were focus tested in this research in a small normative college student sample of 75 undergraduate students. The results demonstrate that American college students find the videos authentic, disturbing and turn them away from ISIS, fulfilling the goals that the project is aiming for in producing counter-narrative materials.
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2017 |
McDowell-Smith, A., Speckhard, A., and Yayla, A. |
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Journal Article |
Extracting Social Structure from DarkWeb Forums
View Abstract
This paper explores various Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques in order to identify a range of potentially ‘important’ members of Islamic Networks within Dark Web Forums. For this experiment, we conducted our investigation on five forums collected in previous work as part of the DarkWeb Forum portal and built upon the tool support created in our previous research in order to visualise and analyse the network. Whilst existing work attempts to identify these structures through state-of-the-art Computational Linguistic techniques, our work relies on the communication metadata alone. Our analysis involved first calculating a range of SNA metrics to better understand the group members, and then apply unsupervised learning in order to create clusters that would help classify the Dark Web Forums users into hierarchical clusters. In order to create our social networks, we investigated the effect of repeated author resolution and various weighting schemes on the ranking of forum members by creating four social networks per forum and evaluating the correlation of the top n users (for n = 10; 20; 30; 40; 50 and 100). Our results identified that varying the weighting schemes created more consistent ranking schemes than varying the repeated author resolution.
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2015 |
Phillips, E., Nurse, J.R.C., Goldsmith, M. and Creese, S. |
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Greetings from the cybercaliphate: some notes on homeland insecurity
View Abstract
One of the paradoxical effects of the 7 July bombings in London was to expose the ambivalence in the British government’s attempt to wage war on terror by forcefully prosecuting war against those who resort to jihad abroad, actively participating in coalitions of the willing whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, while affording some of Islamism’s key ideologists and strategists a high degree of latitude in the United Kingdom itself. This indicates a number of contradictions in official policy that simultaneously recognizes the globalized threat from violent Islamic militancy while, under the rubric of multiculturalism, tolerating those very strains of Islamist radicalism, some of which draw upon the interdependent and transnational character of conflict, to render the UK vulnerable to those very same violent forces. Consequently, the British authorities displayed a studied indifference towards this developing transnational phenomenon both during the 1990s and in some respects even after the London bombings. To explore the curious character of the government’s response to the Islamist threat requires the examination of the emergence of this radical ideological understanding and what it entails as a reaction to modernization and secularism in both thought and practice. The analysis explores how government policies often facilitated the non-negotiable identity politics of those promoting a pure, authentic and regenerated Islamic order both in the UK and abroad. This reflected a profound misunderstanding of the growing source and appeal of radical Islam that can be interpreted as a consequence of the slow-motion collision between modernity in its recent globalized form and an Islamic social character, which renders standard western modernization theory, and indeed, the notion of a ‘social science’ itself, deeply questionable.
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2005 |
Martin Jones, David. and Smith, M.L.R. |
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IRA 2.0: Continuing the Long War—Analyzing the Factors Behind Anti-GFA Violence
View Abstract
Despite an increasing number of attacks by violent anti-Good Friday Agreement (GFA) Republicans from 2009 there is still relatively little understanding of the nature of these organizations or the likely longevity of their campaign(s). This analysis argues that the current upsurge of violence is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, due to a combination of factors that entrench republican ideology. The fractured nature of anti-GFA groups and the declining stature of the Provisional movement are key factors that energize anti-agreement sentiment. In particular, this study identifies the Internet as one of the most significant emerging drivers in that it has the potential to sustain social networks that create and reinforce a traditional minded Irish Republican constituency implacably committed to using violence in pursuit of its goals.
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2012 |
Frenett, R. and Smith, M.L.R. |
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Report |
Mapping Networks and Narratives of Online Right-Wing Extremists in New South Wales
View Abstract
The project Mapping Networks and Narratives of Online Right-Wing Extremists in New South Wales (NSW) used the systematic mining and analysis of online data to generate evidence-based insights into online right-wing extremism (RWE) across the state. The project was conducted between July 2019 and February 2020 with data collection occurring from August to November 2019. The project addressed three key areas:
– What is the nature of the online RWE environment in NSW?
– How are themes and narratives framed in different online contexts in order to mobilise support?
– What level of risk does the online RWE environment pose?
The research areas were framed as broad questions to facilitate wide exploratory research into the online RWE movement in NSW, a milieu that has been little studied. This breadth of scope was considered pertinent in the wake of the March 2019 mass casualty terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, by an attacker originating from NSW.
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2020 |
Ballsun-Stanton, B., Waldek, L., Droogan, J., Smith, D., Iqbal, M. and Puecker, M. |
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