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This article will argue that social media in the hands of terrorist groups constitutes a weapon, and has become increasingly capable of contributing to the facilitation of consequential harm against identified targets. In doing so it will first clarify the communicative nature of terrorist action and provide an overview of the various contributions made by jihadist strategists to the evolution of terrorist practice, and in particular the re-emergence of the practice of individual terrorism. It will then identify the intersection of individual terrorism and social media and the development and deployment of a system of social media jihad. 2 The article will explain the mechanisms by which terrorist groups exploit and deploy social media platforms, and inflict various harms, with a specific focus on individual and small cell terrorism in Western jurisdictions. Finally, a brief case study analysis of Anwar al-Awlaki will demonstrate the gravity with which governments have conceived of this problem, in part by highlighting the substantiveness of their responses.

Despite the destruction and chaos sown on the battlefield by the group that calls itself the Islamic State, one could argue that its propaganda efforts toward supporters, sympathizers, and enemies have also had disruptive results. Whether online or on the ground, the group has sought to use propaganda to magnify the effects of its battlefield successes, minimize the consequences of its failures, recruit new adherents, and increase awareness of its ultimate goals.

Given the focus that the Islamic State places on its media activities, it is important for those fighting the group to have a level of familiarity with the breadth, content, and nature of these activities. The goal of this report is twofold. First, it attempts to examine declassified documents captured from the group’s predecessors to provide a baseline understanding of its present-day media structure and operations. Second, through an examination of over 9,000 Islamic State official media products, this report offers detailed insight into what the group is saying and what a study of its propaganda can tell us about its strengths, weaknesses, and struggles.

In an effort to better understand the risk of individuals being radicalised via the internet, this paper re-examines the phenomenon of online radicalisation by focusing on four considerations of interest: individual, online environment, interactions between individual and the online environment, and protective elements. A key premise of the discussion presented is that the different theoretical assumptions and linkages underlying each consideration are not only reconcilable but that together they provide a more comprehensive understanding of assessing risk of radicalisation via the internet than any perspective by itself. Implications for operationalising these four considerations and their associated factors to identify individuals at risk of being radicalised via the internet will also be discussed.

Many states and authorities around the world keep an open eye on activity over social media sites (which are considered nowadays as one of the main platforms exercising freedom of opinion and expression) and have dealt with its users with a sense of caution and suspicion. In an effort to censor materials that may threaten them, some authorities have used arrest, interrogation, prosecution and even physical abuse against some users.

This approach has also lead to the banning of certain social media sites for periods or permanently in certain cases. Similarly, this practice of persecuting journalists and activists for their views and material shared on social media platforms has been rampant in Palestine, especially with the widespread use of social media in recent years.

According to the latest statistics of last year 2015, according to a report released through “Social Studio” project initiated by “Concepts” company, to document the status quo of social media in Palestine, results showed that the rate of internet users in Palestine amounted to 50%, furthermore, results also showed that social media users in Palestine amounted to 37%, while the number of “Facebook” users in West Bank and Gaza Strip amounted to 1,780,000 users , in addition to 170 thousand users in Jerusalem chose Arabic language to use Facebook2 ; considered to be as the most prevalent and common social media used in Palestine.

Although it has been a part of the dark underbelly of the Internet since its inception, recent events have brought the discussion board site 4chan to the forefront of the world’s collective mind. In particular, /pol/, 4chan’s “Politically Incorrect” board has become a central figure in the outlandish 2016 Presidential election. Even though 4chan has long been viewed as the “final boss of the Internet,” it remains relatively unstudied in the academic literature. In this paper we analyze /pol/ along several axes using a dataset of over 8M posts. We first perform a general characterization that reveals how active posters are, as well as how some unique features of 4chan affect the flow of discussion. We then analyze the content posted to /pol/ with a focus on determining topics of interest and types of media shared, as well as the usage of hate speech and differences in poster demographics. We additionally provide quantitative evidence of /pol/’s collective attacks on other social media platforms. We perform a quantitative case study of /pol/’s attempt to poison anti-trolling machine learning technology by altering the
language of hate on social media. Then, via analysis of comments from the 10s of thousands of YouTube videos linked on /pol/, we provide a mechanism for detecting attacks from /pol/ threads on 3rd party social media services.

The phenomenon of foreign fighters has become a central issue to the ongoing conflict in Syria. This article explores how members of the public answer the question ‘Why do British citizens join the conflict in Syria’ on social media sites and in response to online news articles. Building upon research on everyday narratives of security and terrorism, we analyse 807 comments, and in doing so, we argue that online comments are important in producing the discursive environment for making sense of British foreign fighters and what should be done in response to them. We find that there is a tendency to view British foreign fighters as being purely motivated by religion, and there is also a belief that British foreign fighters should be responded to through exceptional measures. We discuss the implications of such perceptions, and we highlight how problematic misconceptions about Islam and Muslims are not just disseminated through elite and media discourse, but through everyday narratives published by members of the public online.