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VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

This article offers a panoramic vision of the studies carried out on the Manosphere and anti-feminism in the Spanish and overarching European context. In this work, we have reviewed the most recent and relevant studies focused on understanding organized online misogyny and toxic technocultures. In addition, the incipient works on the Spanish manosphere developed in the last five years have been analyzed in order to connect European knowledge with local advances. This critical review offers a state of the art that includes: a definition of the manosphere, a defense of the importance of its study, a review of the topics covered by subject areas, a diagnosis of what remains to be done, and an ethical warning for those researchers who want to commit to the work of unraveling what the manosphere is.

The strategy of jihadist groups is based on objectives that are sometimes global. Specifically, many of these groups argue that Muslims, wherever they live, should fight for the establishment of an Islamic state or, at least, for such a state to be possible elsewhere. Therefore, taking advantage of the emergence of the Internet, they initiated an equally universal narrative strategy, with the production of a great deal of content, especially audiovisual texts. The effects of this material are known and, unfortunately, may be behind the terrorist actions of various individuals in many countries. Hence the concern of academics lies with their analyses and with the development of methodologies that can successfully deal with large amounts of multimodal information. The present research, therefore, aims to apply a quantitative procedure to the analysis of jihadist propaganda. Specifically, the authors have analysed 2,211 videos belonging to different terrorist groups, by applying an image classification algorithm. The results show that this type of approach has realistic possibilities of providing relevant information about this corpus – when realized, they may help to create automated analytical tools capable of dealing with the enormous amount of information that can be disseminated on-line.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

A new revolution has begun in counterterrorism—the Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution. The AI revolution has had a significant impact on many areas of security and intelligence. The use of AI and big data in general, and in the field of intelligence and counterterrorism in particular, has led to intense debates between supporters of the continuation and expansion of the use of this technology and those who oppose it. The traditional delicate balance between effectiveness in the fight against terrorism and the liberal democratic values of society becomes even more crucial when counterterrorism engages in AI and big data technology