Online Library

VOX-Pol Blog post.

This paper, part of the Legal Perspectives on Tech Series, was commissioned in conjunction with the Congressional Counterterrorism Caucus.

In recent years, there has been an intensification of international extremist violence linked in varying degrees to Internet-facilitated radicalisation. This has related to, among other things, a growth in prevalence of politically violent actors, including far-right and jihadist collectives. Extreme political polarisation, sometimes termed the ‘hyper-tribalism’ of those with violent or extreme views, is to some extent reinforced by these entities’ participation in social media. Radicalisation to terrorism is also arguably facilitated by the architectures of social media platforms, which comprise of personalisation algorithms and the re-mediating functions of ‘likes’, ‘shares’, and ‘re-tweets’ (Sunstein 2009; Pariser 2011; Wood 2017). This chapter reflects on characteristics of social media that can be perceived to encourage violent extremism and terrorism, and legal, security, and technological measures that have been developed internationally to prevent and counter online violent extremist expression. With reference to recent terrorism-related trends, it also highlights a disparity in legal measures to address far-right hate speech (Gelber & McNamara 2016; Davey et al. 2018), relative to thoseused to police and restrict online activity related to jihadism (Conway et al. 2018).

VOX-Pol Blog post.

This report concerns itself with terrorist technical innovation, particularly with regards to terrorists’ incorporation of emerging technologies into their practices. More specifically, it investigates, through the elaboration of a theoretical learning framework, how terrorist groups can adopt the practices of ideological enemies operating in different security, ideological and political environments. It does so through a study of three cases of emerging technology use by Islamic State (IS) and racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists (REMVE), which shed light on why ideologically diverse groups might adopt practices from each other.

In the recent past, the numbers of religiously- and politically-motivated terrorist attacks have increased, inevitably raising the question of effective measures to prevent further terrorist attacks. Empirical studies related to school shootings have shown that school shooters reliably (directly and indirectly) disclosed their intentions or plans prior to the attack, a phenomenon termed leaking or leakage. Leaking has been used for preventive purposes in this area of research. Recent research has indicated that leaking was also present prior to politically and religiously motivated terrorist attacks. In order to determine the current state of knowledge about leaking related to these offenses, we conducted a review of the international literature on religiously and politically motivated terrorist attacks. Up to 90% of the offenders showed some type of leaking prior to the attacks. A range of different forms of leaking could be observed. Leaking often occurred in the form of verbal communication with family and friends and/or via communication over the Internet. Terrorist offenders apparently tend to show leaking more often than other groups of mass murderers. Findings regarding similarities and dissimilarities in leaking between religiously motivated, jihadist and politically-motivated, far-right terrorist attacks were contradictory. We discuss the implications of these findings for practice and research as well as the strengths and possible weaknesses of the leaking concept.