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This article offers a descriptive analysis of the propaganda activities of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb on Internet social media. It examines the group’s propaganda actions from its creation in 1998 until the end of 2015 and argues that the use of social media, Twitter in particular, has failed to offer any real remedy to its mediocre propaganda actions. During the period in which its Twitter profiles were active, the organization continued to manifest the same problems, including a shortage of qualified human resources and poor internal coordination, which had prevented it from engaging in efficient propaganda activity previously. The study of the social media experience of the group offers further evidence of the vulnerabilities of this Maghrebi jihadist organization.

This case study explores the convergence of white extremist political ideology with mainstream political ideology on the micro-blogging platform Twitter – a phenomenon termed “inter-ideological mingling”. Exploring the spread of white extremism in the digital environment can provide insight into the growth of hate groups in the physical environment. A sample of 4800 tweets was examined through hierarchical cluster analysis and textual analysis. Several pieces of evidence were found supporting inter-ideological mingling. Cluster analysis shows that extremist terms are not isolated from terms found in mainstream political discourse. Textual analysis of individual tweets provides evidence for five strategies of inter-ideological mingling: joining, blending, piggybacking, backstaging, and narrating.

Over the past decade and a half, Western countries have spent vast sums of money on efforts aimed at combating terrorism, both at home and abroad. A significant percentage of these locally implemented counterterrorism initiatives have focused their efforts on combating what many governments now refer to as ‘radicalisation to violent extremism’. However, from its inception the concept of radicalisation to violent extremism, or ‘radicalisation’ as it is more commonly referred to, has been a source of ambiguity and confusion.
Rather than emerging from social science research, the term ‘radicalisation’ first appeared in a May 2004 EU document listing possible root causes conducive to the recruitment of individuals by foreign extremists. An expert group established by the European Commission shortly thereafter, noted that the notion was inherently problematic, and cautioned against the use of the term due to its ambiguity (Coolsaet, 2015, p. 5). However, attacks in Madrid and London thrust the concepts of ‘radicalisation’ and ‘counter radicalisation’ to the centre stage of European counterterrorism policy. The prominence of these UK and European efforts has subsequently seen the concept migrate and rise to prominence in other Western countries including Canada, Australia and eventually the USA.

To this day radicalisation remains a contested and misunderstood term, largely because the concept emphasises the individual (and to some extent the ideology) and ‘significantly de-emphasises the wider circumstances and the context in which it arises’ (Sedgwick, 2012, p. 480).

Given the difficulties in designing a solution for a problem which is ill defined, it is hardly surprising that the ambiguity associated with radicalisation has extended to the policy response, today largely referred to as countering violent extremism (CVE).
CVE has coevolved with the debate about radicalisation as a subfield of counterterrorism policy and practice (Holmer, 2013, p. 2). The term (CVE) likely emerged from a policy department which, after determining that concepts such as terrorism and radicalisation were too poorly defined and stigmatised to use, resolved to introduce into the discourse the best new poorly defined term a focus group could generate. The lack of a clear definition of CVE has unsurprisingly resulted in the concept evolving ‘into a catch-all category that lacks precision and focus’ (Heydemann, 2014) and seen many programmes conducted under the CVE banner unable to define the specifics of what they ‘are preventing, let alone knowing how or whether … [they] have prevented it’ (Horgan, 2014).

Although the resources allocated to CVE are modest compared to those dedicated to more traditional counterterrorism efforts, CVE represents the most significant development in counterterrorism in Western countries seen in the last 10 years (Romaniuk, 2015). However, many governments have thus far struggled to generate effective and practical projects (Ramalingam & Tuck, 2014) and one of the world’s leading terrorism experts has noted that ‘we have a rapidly diminishing opportunity to figure out what CVE can be’ (Horgan, 2014). The following special issue seeks to assist policy-makers and practitioners to understand what CVE is, and to design effective CVE policies and projects.

This special edition of Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression draws together research conducted by some of the world’s leading thinkers on the topic of CVE. All contributors hold extensive experience working closely with CVE policy-makers and practitioners, and the findings contained within the following publications highlight the potential for action-research to assist in the CVE work performed by governments. The first article presents a framework to help understand the concept of CVE, and a system to categorise the breadth of CVE programmes, while the second paper proposes a model which can be utilised to build a balanced and effective CVE strategy. The third examines findings from two studies looking at the difficulties associated with reaching those most in need of assistance, while the final paper analyses a specific CVE effort in detail and measures the impact the project has had on the ground. Below is an overview of the four papers which make up this edition.

As a growing number of women engage in violent extremism, urgent questions about their recruitment and motivations are yet to be answered, particularly on the role of social media. Extremist organizations such as the Islamic State are adept at using social media messages to attract Western followers. Less clear is what tools can be used to deter recruitment when female extremists are taking a bigger part in orchestrating these campaigns. Join the Conflict Prevention and Resolution Forum at the U.S. Institute of Peace on May 10 for a discussion of women, social media and extremism.

In the view of many analysts, coercion is the reason most women join violent extremist groups, insurgencies and revolutionary organizations. There are, however, more sophisticated, nuanced and complex explanations such as a search for identity and sense of belonging. At the forum, a panel of experts will consider these motives and the means to address them online in the context of countering violent extremism. Join the conversation on Twitter with #CPRF.

The Online Social Network (OSN) has evolved as a popular platform enabling rich topic-centric interactions and serving as a medium to facilitate online radicalization (Behr et al. 2013). Keeping in view the growing need of uncovering online radicalization, we focus on the information network of Twitter and present an approach for identifying dynamic communities, which arise due to “radical” topic-centric user interactions. The approach at successive timestamps deploys evolving topic-entity maps along with evolving interaction graphs. We propose “Rate of Overlap (ROAct)” to determine the similarity among successive community timestamps. We further validate our approach using an open dataset of criminal offences in the city of Denver, Colorado. The approach presented is simple, fast, and effective for dynamic identification of topic-centric communities and, thus, will enable law enforcement agencies to identify hidden radicalization.

Online video sharing platforms such as YouTube contains several videos and users promoting hate and extremism. Due to low barrier to publication and anonymity, YouTube is misused as a platform by some users and communities to post negative videos disseminating hatred against a particular religion, country or person. We formulate the problem of identification of such malicious videos as a search problem and present a focused-crawler based approach consisting of various components performing several tasks: search strategy or algorithm, node similarity computation metric, learning from exemplary profiles serving as training data, stopping criterion, node classifier and queue manager. We implement two versions of the focused crawler: best-first search and shark search. We conduct a series of experiments by varying the seed, number of n-grams in the language model based comparer, similarity threshold for the classifier and present the results of the experiments using standard Information Retrieval metrics such as precision, recall and F-measure. The accuracy of the proposed solution on the sample dataset is 69% and 74% for the best-first and shark search respectively. We perform characterization study (by manual and visual inspection) of the anti-India hate and extremism promoting videos retrieved by the focused crawler based on terms present in the title of the videos, YouTube category, average length of videos, content focus and target audience. We present the result of applying Social Network Analysis based measures to extract communities and identify core and influential users.