Online Library

This report looks at journalism and social media reporting in Nigeria. The author raises key implications in journalistic reporting by looking at the 2014 #BringBackOurGirls social media campaign. This study importantly takes both a local and a global perspective on Nigeria’s media reporting.

This report is part of a wider project, led by the International Centre for Counter- Terrorism (ICCT) – the Hague, and funded by the EU Devco on “Mitigating the Impact of Media Reporting of Terrorism”. This project aims to produce evidence-based guidance and capacity building outputs based on original, context-sensitive research into the risks and opportunities in media reporting of terrorism and terrorist incidents. The role of media reporting on terrorism has been under investigated and is an underutilised dimension of a holistic counter-terrorism strategy. How the media reports on terrorism has the potential to impact counter-terrorism (CT) perspective positively or negatively.

Although regulation frameworks of terrorist and harmful content online have been passed by governments in recent years, regulation in practice remains mostly a matter of solo or self-regulation by the tech sector. That is, when companies draft and apply their own rules for moderating user-generated content on their platforms or when they voluntarily comply with standards shared amongst the tech sector (the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism is one example), without such standards being enforced by law. This, coupled with increased public pressure to address the potential harmful impact of certain online content – in particular terrorist material – has led major tech companies to develop their own councils, consortiums, and boards to oversee their content moderation and its impact on freedom of speech online. In this blogpost, we provide an overview of some of the prominent tech sector initiatives in this area.

In this post, we look at academic analysis of global efforts to regulate online content and speech.

To follow-up on our previous blogpost on academic analysis of the state of global online regulation, we take here a future oriented approach and provide an overview of academics and experts’ suggestions and analysis of what the future of online regulation might bring.

The 4chan /pol/ platform is a controversial online space on which a surge in hate speech has been observed. While recent research indicates that events may lead to more hate speech, empirical evidence on the phenomenon remains limited. This study analyzes 4chan /pol/ user activity during the mass shootings in Christchurch and Pittsburgh and compares the frequency and nature of user activity prior to these events. We find not only a surge in the use of hate speech and anti-Semitism but also increased circulation of duplicate messages, links, and images and an overall increase in messages from users who self-identify as “white supremacist” or “fascist” primarily voiced from English-speaking IP-based locations: the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Great Britain. Finally, we show how these hybrid media events share the arena with other prominent events involving different agendas, such as the U.S. midterm elections. The significant increase in duplicates during the hybrid media events in this study is interpreted beyond their memetic logic. This increase can be interpreted through what we refer to as activism of hate. Our findings indicate that there is either a group of dedicated users who are compelled to support the causes for which shooting took place and/or that users use automated means to achieve duplication.

This research briefing explores if and how far-right narratives from the United States (US), France and Germany gain traction in domestic mainstream media, or move across borders between the US on the one hand, and France and Germany on the other. It tests what will be referred to as the mainstreaming hypothesis (far-right ideas start out in far-right alternative media but eventually move to the mainstream) and the transnationalisation hypothesis (far-right ideas spread between national media ecosystems).