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Who is likely to be a target of online hate and extremism? To answer this question, we use an online survey (N = 963) of youth and young adults recruited from a demographically balanced sample of Americans. Adapting routine activity theory, we distinguish between actor-initiated social control (i.e., self-help), other-initiated social control (i.e., collective efficacy), and guardianship and show how self-help is positively related to the likelihood of being targeted by hate. Our findings highlight how online exposure to hate materials, target suitability, and enacting social control online all influence being the target of hate. Using social networking sites and encountering hate material online have a particularly strong relationship with being targeted with victim suitability (e.g., discussing private matters online, participating in hate online) and confronting hate also influencing the likelihood of being the target of hate speech.

This thesis concerns the possibility of deceiving cyberterrorists using defensive deception methods. As cyberspace today is a battleground for myriad cyber attacks and intrusions, it may only be a matter of time before terrorists choose to advance their deadly cause in cyberspace. We explore some of the questions raised regarding the threat of cyberterrorism by examining different perspectives, motivations, actors, targets, and how they may be confronted. One way is to draw from the lessons of deception and apply them against cyberterrorist attacks. Cyber deception applies in cyberspace just as well as deception in military battles. From the different categories of attackers that could perpetrate cyberterrorism, we examine the ways in which they may be deceived. Many of the methods and tools that cyberterrorists would use are similar to those used by other less malicious hackers, so we can plan specific deceptions to use against them in advance.

Acute crisis events ranging from natural disasters to terrorist incidents now tend to generate an almost immediate response from social media users. This is especially pronounced on Twitter, due to that platform’s specific affordances as a particularly open and real-time medium. While analyses of such events have increased over recent years, we still understand relatively little about the way in which audiovisual materials relating to such crises are circulated and what they contribute to processes of witnessing. This is important, however, in an increasingly visual age when audiovisual material tends to be more widely viewed and shared than plain-text updates, and thus has a greater potential to influence viewers’ interpretations of an event. To address this gap in our understanding, this article investigates the distribution dynamics of audiovisual content on Twitter in the immediate aftermath of terror attacks in Paris and Brussels. Results point to the importance of broadening conceptualisations of conflict-related visuals and the ongoing relevance of affective content in such material. Furthermore, this article argues that contexts of time and space are crucial to consider, as is the role that individual actors – both human and non-human – play in disseminating such content.

Terrorist groups have proved in recent years that they are particularly adept at
utilizing the Internet and social media to facilitate their activities, including incitement
to commit a terrorist act, radicalization to violence, recruitment, training, planning,
collection of information, communication, preparation, financing and execution of
attacks. In addition to Al-Qaida, one terrorist entity that has benefited significantly from
ICT is the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), also known as Daesh. ISIL and its
supporters exploit the Internet as a means to broadcast its ideology and has made effective
use of the vast reach and rapidly evolving communications environment provided by
social media applications, which also serve as a highly effective tool for ISIL recruiters,
who have succeeded in attracting a global pool of around 25,000 foreign fighters from
over 100 States.

This paper discusses the use of computer support to analyze IS propaganda. We focus on thematic analysis of the textual content of various types of online propaganda, and investigate two different ways to identify themes in the data. One approach is theory-driven and builds on previous analysis of IS propaganda, and the other approach is data-driven and automatically identifies prevalent themes in the data. We exemplify the various approaches using different types of IS propaganda and we also provide examples of how the computer-assisted analysis can be used to analyze variation in the data over time. Both approaches indicate an increase in more violent themes in more recent IS propaganda.

VOX-Pol Blog post.