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There is an increasing threat posed by terrorism in modern day, and with the internet enabling new ways of disseminating online terrorist propaganda, audiences and support for terrorist groups are growing. The complex linkage between society and technology is become ever more critical as the world continues to shift more day-to-day life online, and this notion has increased greatly during the coronavirus global pandemic where online platforms have become an essential aspect for communicating. The spread of online terrorist propaganda has sparked concerns about the governance of Internet. However, Internet governance is multifaceted, complex and can be examined through various lenses. This paper argues that there is a need for a socio-technical perspective, exploring the inextricable linkages between societies and technology, on Internet governance. Focusing on the UK’s approach to governing terrorist propaganda, the paper highlights the strengths and limitations of the model of national law and regulation.

Since 2016, at least 43 countries around the globe have proposed or implemented regulations specifically designed to tackle different aspects of influence campaigns, including both real and perceived threats of fake news, social media abuse, and election interference. Some governments are in the early stages of designing regulatory measures specifically for digital contexts so they can tackle issues related to the malicious use of social media. For others, existing legal mechanisms regulating speech and information are already well established, and the digital aspect merely adds an additional dimension to law enforcement. Our research team conducted an analysis of proposed or implemented regulations and identified a number of interventions. Some measures target social media platforms, requiring them to take down content, improve transparency, or tighten data protection mechanisms. Other measures focus on civil actors and media organisations, on supporting literacy and advocacy efforts, and on improving standards for journalistic content production and dissemination. A third group of interventions target governments themselves, obligating them to invest in security and defence programs that combat election interference, or to initiate formal inquiries into such matters. Finally, a fourth group of interventions take aim at the criminalisation of automated message generation and disinformation.

This article offers a method for systematically grading the quality of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) videos based on technical production criteria. Using this method revealed moments when ISIS production capacity was severely debilitated (Fall 2015) and when they began to rebuild (Spring 2016), which the article details. Uses for
this method include evaluating propaganda video output across time and across groups, and the ability to assess kinetic actions against propaganda organizations. This capacity will be critical as Islamic State media production teams will be pushed out of its territory as the State collapses.

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.

The use of the Internet to spawn hate sites and recruit advocates for hate began as early as the mid-1980s in bulletin boards, and the first acknowledged hate site was Stormfront, in the early 1990s. Since then hundreds of hate sites and other websites advocating terror have been developed, some with stated aims of recruiting young people and influencing extreme action. This article reviews what is currently known about the development of hate sites into sophisticated recruitment and attitude-influencing mechanisms. The questions asked are: how do hate sites recruit members who might normally not be involved in hate and extreme action, how may hate sites radicalize the actions of young people already accepting of the mindset advocated by the website, and how effective is Internet recruitment?

The bulk of this article is concerned with showing why computer hackers and terrorists are unlikely to form an unholy alliance to engage in so-called
cyberterrorism. The remainder of the paper examines why neither hacktivists nor crackers fall easily into the cyberterrorist category either.