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Radical, terroristic organizations pose threats to business, government, and society. The ubiquity of the modern Web and its participatory architecture have enabled such groups to become full-blown online propaganda machines. Today, radicalization that eventually leads to acts of terror occurs predominantly on the Web. Radical ideologies can be spread, in many cases unchecked, by malicious actors who take advantage of the frequently lax surveillance apparatus of online social platforms. This paper argues that an overlooked, essential first step to interdicting this threat is the large-scale, structured collection of knowledge regarding these ideologies in open machine-readable formats. Using Collective Action Framing Theory, this study develops a trio of design artifacts: the Terror Beliefs Ontology (TBO) for a general ontology of terroristic ideology, the Frame Discovery System (FDS) to automatically populate this ontology, and the Frame Resonance Detection System (FRDS) to accurately identify online personae or postings that espouse a radical ideology known to TBO. With a comprehensive evaluation, we demonstrate how these three instantiated design artifacts, working in concert, can automatically construct a knowledge representation of heterogeneous terroristic ideologies and accurately detect radical online postings. We offer the first design that can assign Web text to any radical ideology without the use of a hand-labeled training corpus.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

A joint statement issued following a meeting of the ministers of the interior in Paris regarding the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

The ISIS videos staging the executions of James Foley and Steven Sotloff are usually understood as devices to deter, recruit, and “sow terror.” Left unanswered are questions about how these videos work; to whom they are addressed; and what about them can so continuously bring new audiences into existence. The evident durability of ISIS despite the imminent defeat of its state, coupled with the political impact of these particular videos, make these questions unusually urgent. Complete answers require analysis of the most understudied aspect of the videos that also happens to be vastly understudied in US political science: the visual mode of the violence. Approaching these videos as visual texts in need of close reading shows that they are, among other things, enactments of “retaliatory humiliation” (defined by Islamists) that perform and produce an inversion of power in two registers. It symbolically converts the public abjection of Foley and Sotloff by the Islamist executioner into an enactment of ISIS’ invincibility and a demonstration of American impotence. It also aims to transpose the roles between the US, symbolically refigured as mass terrorist, failed sovereign, and rogue state, and ISIS, now repositioned as legitimate, invincible sovereign. Such rhetorical practices seek to actually constitute their audiences through the very visual and visceral power of their address. The affective power of this address is then extended and intensified by the temporality that conditions it—what I call digital time. Digital time has rendered increasingly rare ordinary moments of pause between rapid and repetitive cycles of reception and reaction—moments necessary for even a small measure of distance. The result is a sensibility, long in gestation but especially of this time, habituated to thinking less and feeling more, to quick response over deliberative action.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.