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At the end of January, VOX-Pol’s Dr Maura Conway (DCU) and Professor Ian Brown (OII) spoke to Belgian public service broadcaster VRT News on the subject of media strategies used by radical groups online. This a video of the news segment.

VOX Pol Workshop: Tackling Online Extremism in Southern Asia

This workshop explores the digital extremist landscape in South and Southeast Asia and the challenges and responses to tackling online extremism. The workshop brings together experts and practitioners researching extremism across the ideological spectrum in Asia, to explore a broad range of issues, including but not limited to the current state of online extremism in South and Southeast Asia, the preferred platforms of the different online communities, the connections between these online spaces, how these online spaces are being used, the narratives found in extremist online content, intersections with narratives from other extremist communities globally, and the measures adopted by different security actors to counter online extremism.

Chair: Miraji Mohamed, CYTREC; Dublin City University

Speakers:

Ms Munira Mustaffa, Chasseur Group

Mr Janeen Fernando, United Nations

Mr Hari Prasad, CRITICA Research and Analysis

VOX-Pol Virtual Roundtable: Artificial Intelligence and Extremism, Wednesday 13 December.

(Please note, some slides are blurred due to sensitivities around ongoing research)

This roundtable is organized by the VOX-Pol Network of Excellence on online extremism in the context of the ExID, Extreme Identities, project funded by the EU Horizon2020 NORFACE programme, Democratic Governance in Turbulent Times. Over the past decade, two major phenomena have developed on the digital realm: the extensive growth of extremism on the internet and exponential improvements of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models. This VOX-Pol Roundtable examines the toxic encounter of these two evolutions, from five distinct perspectives offered by its chair and expert panellists, offering cutting-edge insights on issues such as AI-powered detection of radical content or deepfake use by extremist groups.

Chair

Dr Stephane J. BAELE is Professor of International Relations at the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium) and Honorary Associate Professor of Security and Political Violence at the University of Exeter (UK). The editor of ISIS Propaganda (Oxford University Press), his multidisciplinary work on extremist and violent political actors’ communications has appeared in leading journals such as the Journal of Conflict Resolution or Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. He recently published a CREST Guide on “Artificial Intelligence and Extremism: The Threat of Language Models for Propaganda Purposes” (2022).

Panelists

Dr Lewys BRACE is Senior Lecturer in Computational Social Science at the University of Exeter (UK), where he is the Co-Director of the Q-Step Centre for quantitative social sciences. His work, published in journals like Terrorism & Political Violence or the Journal of Policing, Intelligence & Counter-Terrorism, harnesses data science, Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT), and artificial intelligence methods to analyse extremism, terrorism, cybercrime, and security.

Dr Thomas HEGGHAMMER is Senior Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford (UK). A political scientist and historian specializing in militant Islamism and jihadism (e.g., Jihadi Culture, Jihad in Saudi Arabia, or recently Abdullah Azzam’s biography The Caravan) he has recently deployed computational/AI methods for the study of extremist corpora in Arabic (e.g., “daiR: an R package for OCR with Google Document AI” in the Journal of Open Source Software, and “OCR with Tesseract, Amazon Textract, and Google Document AI: a benchmarking experiment” in the Journal Computational Social Sciences).

Dr Miron LAKOMY is Professor at the Institute of Political Sciences of the University of Silesia (Poland) and currently visiting fellow at the ITSTIME research centre in Milan (Italy). He has held visiting positions at, among others, the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, the University of Milan, and the European University Institute. His research primarily focuses on various aspects of political violence and terrorism on the Internet, as well as military conflicts. He is, among others, the author of the recent article “Artificial Intelligence as a Terrorism Enabler?” (published in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism).

Ms Marie SCHRÖTER is since August the Country Director of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) in the Philippines (after working for FES in Tel Aviv). Before that, she focused on the role of AI in counterterrorism as a Mercator Fellow with the United Nations Office of Counter Terrorism in New York, the International Centre for the Study of Radicalization (ICSR) at the Kings College London, and AlgorithmWatch in Berlin. She is the co-founder (in 2020) of Codetekt – a civil society organization against online disinformation. She is, among others, the author of the report “Artificial Intelligence and Countering Violent Extremism: A Primer” (published by GNET in 2020).

Chapter in Stefan Malthaner and Peter Waldmann (eds.) Radikale Milieus: Das soziale Umfeld terroristischer Gruppen.

Der Beitrag bietet eine kurze Einführung in die Geschichte dschihadistischer Propaganda von den 1980er Jahren bis in die Gegenwart. Nicht nur die medientechnologische und -kulturelle Entwicklung, sondern auch geopolitische Konfliktgeschichte mit wichtigen Stationen wie der sowjetischen Intervention in Afghanistan und dem ersten Tschetschenienkrieg sind hier ausschlaggebend. Was die Entwicklung auf dem Feld der Online-Propaganda betrifft, stützt sich der Verfasser auch auf eigenen Erfahrungen im Rahmen der Beobachtung und Analyse dschihadistischer Internet-Auftritte und -Kommunikatverbreitung.

As white nationalists have come to increasing prominence in recent decades, their presence presents a significant challenge to democratic societies. Motivated by a sense of racial imperilment, and opposed, sometimes violently, to core democratic ideals, white nationalists cannot be meaningfully incorporated into the political life of societies which promote inclusiveness and pluralism without threatening those values. Yet democratic theory, which seeks to offer ideal visions of what democratic societies could look like, provides no means for contending with the active presence of white nationalism in contemporary democratic societies. This article uses the concept of voice to explore these shortcomings in several theories of democracy, including deliberative, agonistic, and empowerment theories. In doing so, it draws on a wealth of white nationalist media, both physical and digital, to demonstrate how attitudes regarding racial imperilment, often articulated in terms of a ‘white genocide’, foreclose on any possibility of incorporating white nationalist voices into democratic societies. Moreover, an examination of white nationalists’ ongoing project to shift the boundaries of what is permissible in popular discourse, a process which is amplified by digital media technologies, suggests that they are nevertheless a pressing problem for democratic societies which should be addressed. In doing so, it is important to move beyond the focus on voice which underlays much democratic theory, exploring instead the experiences of social life to which white nationalist voices speak so that we might gain a better understanding of what motivates white nationalist voice and, potentially, how it might be addressed.