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YouTube is by far the largest host of user-generated video content worldwide. Alas, the platform also hosts inappropriate, toxic, and/or hateful content. One community that has come into the spotlight for sharing and publishing hateful content are the so-called Involuntary Celibates (Incels), a loosely defined movement ostensibly focusing on men’s issues, who have often been linked to misogynistic views. In this paper, we set out to analyze the Incel community on YouTube. We collect videos shared on Incel-related communities within Reddit, and perform a data-driven characterization of the content posted on YouTube along several axes. Among other things, we find that the Incel community on YouTube is growing rapidly, that they post a substantial number of negative comments, and that they discuss a broad range of topics ranging from ideology, e.g., around the Men Going Their Own Way movement, to discussions filled with racism and/or misogyny. Finally, we quantify the probability that a user will encounter an Incel-related video by virtue of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. Within five hops when starting from a non-Incel-related video, this probability is 1 in 5, which is alarmingly high given the toxicity of said content.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

This paper presents a dataset with over 3.3M threads and 134.5M posts from the Politically Incorrect board (/pol/) of the imageboard forum 4chan, posted over a period of almost 3.5 years (June 2016-November 2019). To the best of our knowledge, this represents the largest publicly available 4chan dataset, providing the community with an archive of posts that have been permanently deleted from 4chan and are otherwise inaccessible. We augment the data with a few set of additional labels, including toxicity scores and the named entities mentioned in each post. We also present a statistical analysis of the dataset, providing an overview of what researchers interested in using it can expect, as well as a simple content analysis, shedding light on the most prominent discussion topics, the most popular entities mentioned, and the level of toxicity in each post. Overall, we are confident that our work will further motivate and assist researchers in studying and understanding 4chan as well as its role on the greater Web. For instance, we hope this dataset may be used for cross-platform studies of social media, as well as being useful for other types of research like natural language processing. Finally, our dataset can assist qualitative work focusing on in-depth case studies of specific narratives, events, or social theories.

In this article, we propose a general model of data collection from social media, in the context of terrorism research, focusing on recent studies of jihadists. By analyzing Twitter data collection methods in the existing research, we show that the methods used are prone to sampling biases, and that the sampled datasets are not sufficiently filtered or validated to ensure reliability of conclusions derived from them. Alternatively, we propose some best practices for the collection of data in future research on jihadist using social media (as well as other kinds of terrorist groups). Given the similarity of the methodological challenges posed by research on almost all social media platforms, in the context of terrorism studies, the critique and recommendations offered remain relevant despite the recent shift of most jihadists from Twitter to Telegram and other forms of social media.

The 2023 Supreme Court case Twitter v. Taamneh found that defendant social media companies were not liable for aiding and abetting a terrorist attack overseas. The Court alluded to the existence of an alternative set of facts that might alter their analysis or produce a different outcome. This Comment explores those “other contexts” and seeks to identify what factors could produce a successful Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) aiding and abetting claim against a social media company for an act of terrorism overseas. This is difficult, in part, because the framework for aiding and abetting liability provided in JASTA is seemingly incompatible with the operations of social media companies. To better evaluate how JASTA’s framework should apply to social media companies, both JASTA cases that do not involve social media companies and aiding and abetting cases derived from other sources are analyzed for their relevance to the social media context.

Ultimately, this Comment concludes that it would take an extraordinary set of facts to find social media companies secondarily liable for an act of terrorism. This is, in part, due to the nature of how social media operates and continues to progress at a rapid pace. The increasing role that social media plays in society highlights why deterring further Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) use of social media is critical; as avenues to recruitment and international planning increase, the risk to the United States’ national security also increases. Given that JASTA is not a solution, this Comment suggests other avenues to encourage social media companies to heighten their detection of FTO activity and prevent future attacks.

VOX-Pol Guest Lecture Series, Autumn 2023

Name: Dr. Saimum Parvez

Title: Digital Media and Narrowcasting: How Bangladeshi Violent Extremists Target Women and Youth for Recruitment

Outline: This presentation discusses the role of digital media in recruitment and how it helps recruits and recruiters discover each other. In Bangladesh, digital media have provided opportunities for violent extremists to reach previously unreachable demographics, such as women and youths from ‘westernized’ and well-off backgrounds. Saimum Parvez, Ph.D., is a MSCA-IMPACT cofund post-doctoral fellow at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). This research project is co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 101034352.