Online Library

The Online Civil Courage Initiative’s core partner, ISD, has been tracking both positive and negative
responses to terror attacks in the UK this year, to understand how to improve counterspeech in the
UK. This report contains advice for NGOs working towards challenging hate speech and extremism
online with recommendations/suggestions for how they can respond speedily and effectively in the
aftermath of an attack, and improve understanding on the coordinated efforts (online raids) that are
designed to undermine positive speech.

The increasing complexity and emergence of Web 2.0 applications have paved way for threats arising out of the use of social networks by cyber extremists (Radical groups). Radicalization (also called cyber extremism and cyber hate propaganda) is a growing concern to the society and also of great pertinence to governments & law enforcement agencies all across the world. Further, the dynamism of these groups adds another level of complexity in the domain, as with time, one may witness a change in members of the group and hence has motivated many researchers towards this field. This proposal presents an investigative data mining approach for detecting the dynamic behavior of these radical groups in online social networks by textual analysis of the messages posted by the members of these groups along with the application of techniques used in social network analysis. Some of the preliminary results obtained through partial implementation of the approach are also discussed.

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).

This article presents an empirical analysis of the Australian media representation of terrorism using the 2014 Sydney Lindt Café siege as a case in point to engage with the notion of moral panic. Deploying critical discourse analysis and case study as mixed methods, insights into trans-media narratives and aftermath of the terrifying siege are presented. While news media appeared to collaborate with the Australian right-wing government in the reporting of terrorism, social media posed challenges and raised security concerns for the state. Social media heightened the drama as sites were variously deployed by the perpetrator, activists and concerned members of the public. The amplified trans-media association of Muslims with terrorism in Australia and its national and global impact, in terms of the political exclusion of Muslims, are best described in this article in the form of an Islamophobic Moral Panic Model, invented for a rethink of the various stages of its occurrence, intensification and institutionalization.

Does the internet enable the recruitment of transnational terrorists? Using geo-referenced population census data and personnel records from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant—a highly tech-savvy terrorist organization— this paper shows that internet access has facilitated the organization’s recruitment of foreign fighters from Tunisia. The positive association between internet access and Daesh recruitment is robust to controlling for a large set of observable and unobservable confounders as well as instrumenting internet access rates with the incidence of lightning strikes.

The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) Transparency Working Group (WG) was established in April 2020 as part of the GIFCT substantive Working Group structure. The Transparency WG’s objective is to develop best practices and easy access to resources that facilitate greater transparency from all relevant stakeholders while respecting privacy and human rights. Microsoft and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) representatives serve as co-leads for the WG. In support of its objective, a priority output for the WG is to provide recommendations to the GIFCT intended to help enhance the transparency of the organization and its activities. This report sets out those recommendations
as of June 2021.