Online Library

Paper presented at Swansea University 2014: Terrorists’ Use of the Internet (5th-6th June 2014) by Dr Anne Aly of Curtin University. Dr Daly’s paper focuses on terroristic narratives and counter narratives online.

Advances in Computer Science continue to provide more tools, each time more efficient, to aid us in our everyday lives with everything from work to entertainment, from health to management of natural resources. Technology has made our lives better and continues to facilitate progress. But just as it can benefit us, it is only a tool. That tool itself is not ‘good’ or ‘evil’; it is only useful to achieve the ends of those who utilize it. And just as it has been used for benefit, there have been cases where its use had a detrimental impact on us. Given the benefits, who is to deny that a government can keep track of its citizens in the same way a business keeps track of all its assets? The discussion here will center on this question, where we suspect that, given technological advances, governments are tempted to achieve this goal. The purpose is to present some of the policies that governments in North America and Europe have proposed and/or adopted with respect to technology and national security, and point out flaws that could allow the undue erosion of privacy and free speech in the electronic world as a consequence. We reflect upon those measures that seem unjustified and unnecessary even in the face of terrorism and argue that none of them include adequate safeguards to minimize the risk of abuse. We hope the reader will realize that none of the measures discussed admit that technology can accommodate the protection of civil liberties as well as security. We also argue that at least in Canada’s case, not counting academia and civil rights groups, policies, and laws introduced as a consequence of the events of 9/11 seem to receive little attention from the public at large. Citizens would appear to be unaware of what is being done to mitigate the terrorist threat. Indeed, amidst such legislative actions, we may be getting used to living in a permanent state of war. We hope our conclusions give an insight into the current landscape of privacy protection in North America and, to some extent, Europe.

Aiming to critically review key research on populism, extremism and media, this article examines some definition aspects of populism as a concept, its relation to ‘the people’ and points to future directions for research in mainstream – and social media – the terrain where so much of the political is played out. An individualisation of civic cultures has emerged in tandem with the growth of mediated populism through the use of new technologies, with a tendency towards personalisation in the public domain. While the new technological affordances exemplified by Web 2.0 may have contributed to intensified forms of popular engagement, they have been less successful in promoting democratic values, as shown by the results of the May 2014 European Parliamentary elections. Thus, the question as to the type of publics that are ‘possible and desirable in present circumstances’ (Nolan, 2008: 747) remains valid, for publics can espouse anti-democratic values while nevertheless remaining ‘publics’. The fact that the link between the new media and right-wing extremism has been comparatively explored at greater length than that of a religious bend indicates the need to invest in the latter, especially due to home-bred Islamic terrorism increasingly seen as threatening the multiculturalism of various European societies. Several avenues for research are presented to this effect, with a final reflection on the challenge posed by new media to the concept of media populism, both in terms of the Net’s market logics and the specificity of its architecture.

With the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the issue of domestic radicalisation has taken on renewed significance for Western democracies. In particular, attention has been drawn to the potency of ISIS engagement on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Several governments have emphasised the importance of online programs aimed at undermining ISIS recruitment, including the use of state-run accounts on a variety of social media platforms to respond directly to ISIS messaging. This article assesses the viability of online counter radicalisation by examining the effectiveness of similar programs at the US State Department over the last decade. The article argues that
governments attempting to counter online radicalisation of their domestic populations must take seriously the significant shortcomings of these State Department programs. The most relevant issue in this regard is the recurring problem of credibility, when the authenticity of government information is undercut by the realities of foreign policy practice, and existing perceptions of hypocrisy and duplicity are reinforced in target audiences.

Social media has become an essential part of the daily routines of children and adolescents. Moreover, enormous efforts have been made to ensure the psychological and emotional well-being of young users as well as their safety when interacting with various social media platforms. In this paper, we investigate the exposure of those users to inappropriate comments posted on YouTube videos targeting this demographic. We collected a large-scale dataset of approximately four million records, and studied the presence of five age-inappropriate categories and the amount of exposure to each category. Using natural language processing and machine learning techniques, we constructed ensemble classifiers that achieved high accuracy in detecting inappropriate comments. Our results show a large percentage of worrisome comments with inappropriate content: we found 11% of the comments on children’s videos to be toxic, highlighting the importance of monitoring comments, particularly on children platforms.

This paper uses automated text analysis – the process by which unstructured text is extracted, organised and processed into a meaningful format – to develop tools capable of analysing
Islamic State (IS) propaganda at scale. Although we have used a static archive of IS material, the underlying principle is that these techniques can be deployed against content produced by any number of violent extremist movements in real‑time. This study therefore aims to complement work that looks at technology‑driven strategies employed by social media, video‑hosting and file‑sharing platforms to tackle violent extremist content disseminators.