Online Library

Is the U.S. making headway in the fight against the Islamic State group? Judy Woodruff talks to retired Col. Derek Harvey, a former Army intelligence officer, and Brendan Koerner of Wired Magazine about the military offensive against ISIS, including the killing of a senior leader, and the resiliency of the group on social media.

The Council of Europe commissioned to the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law a comparative study in respect of filtering, blocking and take-down of illegal content on the Internet in the 47 member States of the Organisation. This study describes and assesses the legal framework but also the relevant case-law and practice in the field. It is divided in two main parts: country reports and comparative considerations.

This study sheds light on the emerging threat of terrorists, particularly Hamas and other Palestinian terror organizations, leveraging online crowdfunding and cryptocurrencies. The recent events of October 7, 2023, highlight the pressing nature of this issue. A systematic case analysis reveals the sophisticated exploitation of digital finance for discreet resource accumulation, circumventing traditional oversight. The findings expose unidentified typologies and funding pathways, significantly bolstering terrorist resilience against interdiction efforts. This study provides vital knowledge to catalyze policy adaptations at this critical juncture by probing real-world implications that still lack coordinated responses. Ultimately, this study raises awareness about evolving asymmetries and underscores the importance of closing gaps in vigilance, necessitating academic and policy attention to inform agile, ethical countermeasures before technological vulnerabilities widen further.

Online extremists’ use of social media poses a new form of threat to the general public. These extremists range from cyberbullies to terrorist organizations. Social media providers often suspend the extremists’ accounts in response to user complaints. However, extremist users can simply create new accounts and continue their activities. In this work we present a new set of operational capabilities to address the threat posed by online extremists in social networks. We use thousands of Twitter accounts related to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to develop behavioral models for these users—in particular, what their accounts look like and with whom they connect. We use these models to track existing extremist users by identifying pairs of accounts belonging to the same user. We then present a model for efficiently searching the social network to find suspended users’ new accounts based on a variant of the classic Pólya’s urn setup. We find a simple characterization of the optimal search policy for this model under fairly general conditions. Our urn model and main theoretical results generalize easily to search problems in other fields.

White supremacists and the Far Right political movement in the UK have, had considerable success in spreading their messages through Web sites. Some of these Web sites clearly contribute to an enabling environment for racially motivated violence in our towns and cities and possibly help to underpin also the rise of, and support for, the Far Right in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. From a position that acknowledges the enduring issue of white hegemony in Western societies, this paper provides a number of research-based recommendations for further research and future policy and practice in tackling white supremacist racial hatred on the Net.

The internet has profoundly changed the way we communicate, including how jihadist
groups seek to reach Western audiences with their propaganda strategies. Cases of believed
online-radicalization call for a re-evaluation of radicalization processes, previously thought
to depend on face-to-face interactions. Based on the Hoffman-Sageman debate on whether
top-down or bottom-up processes drive terrorism, this essay explores both social movement
and organizational approaches to understand online-radicalization. Do jihadist
organizations such as Al-Qaeda and IS act as ‘fishermen’, actively engaging in the
radicalization processes of individual recruits, or is radicalization driven by social group
dynamics with little organizational involvement? Essentially, the larger question is: What
role do organizational structures play for radicalization in times of ‘virtual jihad’? Bottomup
radicalization processes are facilitated online, because the conditions for Sageman’s
‘bunch of guys’ are replicated by the characteristics of virtual communication: an echo
chamber effect causes frame-alignment through repetition and enables ‘digital natives’ to
communicate claims that resonate with other ‘digital natives’. Top-down structures are
influential, because organizations continue to employ sophisticated propaganda
development, preachers and special recruiters or ‘fishermen’. The article finds evidence for
both schools of thought and concludes that the internet facilitates both types of
radicalization mechanisms. Only a holistic strategy will be successful in battling onlineradicalization
and must include both targeting direct channels through which the
organizations execute control over recruits, and breaking the echo chamber created by
social movement dynamics in the virtual world. While countermeasures need to include the
provision of alternative social narratives and the utilization of ‘digital natives’ to make
counter-messages more effective, organizational structures need to be tackled
simultaneously, not only by identifying and arresting preachers and recruiters, but also
through stronger internet governance tools and collaboration with social media companies.