Online Library

VOX-Pol Blog post.

This report presents the key findings from the second international conference “Addressing the New Landscape of Terrorism: Towards Formulating Actionable Response” which was held in Bangkok, Thailand on 24-28 July 2017. Sixty-five delegates presented at the conference. Uniquely, for such a conference, the speakers were academics, front line practitioners, social and community actors, government officials and youth drawn from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Germany, New Zealand, Pakistan, Sweden, Thailand, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Other attendees included representatives from the National Broadcasting and Telecommunication Commission of Thailand, the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the National Security Council of Thailand, the Royal Thai Police, the Thai Ministry of Defense and various security agencies in Thailand, the UNODC, the Delegation of the European Union to Thailand, the Australian Embassy in Thailand, the United States of America Embassy in Thailand, the French Embassy in Thailand and the Embassy of the Kingdom of Belgium. This report provides summaries of each of the presentations that were delivered at the conference, before drawing out the key themes, which emerged and policy recommendations.

There has been an increased focus on reducing hate, harassment, and extremist exploitation in digital games through solutions from community management, trust and safety, and design perspectives. Despite this attention, the industry lacks basic standards around these issues and efforts in this area are stymied by the ubiquity of “toxic gamer culture” and fears in the industry about discussing extremism and hate within games. Today, a patchwork of strategies and tools exist. In this study, focus groups with industry professionals were conducted to increase understanding of industry professional’s perceptions of these problems and solutions. Several primary themes regarding solutions emerged: game and social system design strategies, moderation and player report strategies, and wish list solutions.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

The paper explores how visual affective practice is used to spread and bolster a nationalist, extremist and racist ethos on the public Facebook page of the anti-immigrant group, Soldiers of Odin. Affective practice refers to a particular sensibility of political discourse, shaped by social formations and digital technologies—the contexts in which political groups or communities gather, discuss and act. The study shows how visual affective practice and sharing and responding to images fortify moral claims, sense exclusionary solidarity and promote white nationalist masculinity which legitimizes racist practices of “soldiering.” By examining both the representations and their reactions (emoticons), the study demonstrates how ideas and values are collectively strengthened through affective sharing and are supported by platform infrastructures. Most importantly, it demonstrates that instead of considering the affect of protecting the nation as a natural result of “authentic” gut feeling, we should understand the ways it is purposefully and collectively produced and circulated.

Over the past decade, two major phenomena have developed in the digital realm. On the one hand, extremism has grown massively on the Internet, with sprawling online ecosystems hosting a wide range of radical subcultures and communities associated with both ‘stochastic terrorism’ and the ‘mainstreaming of extremism’. On the other hand, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has undergone exponential improvement: from ChatGPT to video deepfakes, from autonomous vehicles to face-recognition CCTV systems, an array of AI technologies has abruptly entered our everyday lives. This report examines ‘AI extremism’, the toxic encounter of these two evolutions – each worrying in its own right. Like past technological progress, AI will indeed be – in fact already is – used in various ways to bolster extremist agendas. Identifying the many opportunities for action that come with a range of AI models, and linking them with different types of extremist actors, we offer a clear overview of the numerous facets of AI extremism. Building on the nascent academic and government literature on the issue as well as on our own empirical and theoretical work, we provide new typologies and concepts to help us organize our understanding of AI extremism, systematically chart its instantiations, and highlight thinking points for stakeholders in countering violent extremism.