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VOX-Pol Guest Lecture Series, Spring 2024: Data Collection in Online Terrorism and Extremism Research

There has been a growing interest among researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to analyze the online activities of extremists and terrorists. As studies in this research area have increased, various data collection techniques have emerged to address key research questions, ranging from manual extraction to computational tools to collect online information. This lecture examines the strengths and limitations of commonly used data collection methods in online terrorism and extremism research. We draw from our research experiences and highlight ethical dilemmas with collection methods in practice. We then set forth suggestions for progressing research in this space. For more information on data collection in online terrorism and extremism research, see our recent article in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism as part of a special issue on the strengths and struggles of different methods of research on radicalization, extremism, and terrorism: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1057610X.2024.2361957?src=exp-la

Ryan Scrivens is an Assistant Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. He is also an Associate Director at the International CyberCrime Research Centre at Simon Fraser University and a Research Fellow at the VOX-Pol Network of Excellence. He is the recipient of the 2022 Early Career Impact Award from the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Terrorism and Bias Crimes.

Steven Chermak is a Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. He is the co-creator of several databases including the Extremist Crime Database (ECDB), the Extremist Cybercrime Database (ECCD), and The American School Shooting Study (TASSS). He is the recipient of the 2021 Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Terrorism and Bias Crimes.

VOX-Pol is pleased to share the latest online workshop on “Borderline Online Content” which took place in June 2024. The workshop is hosted by Brigitte Naderer, Senior Researcher at the Medical University of Vienna, Heidi Schulze Research Associate at LMU Munich, and Diana Rieger, Professor at LMU Munich. The presenters will speak on topics around borderline, ‘hard to regulate’, content in the following four talks:

Heidi Schulze & Simon Greipl “A Little Less Hate, But a Lot More Harm – Fear Speech as Strategic Borderline Communication”

Hannah Rose: “Hybridised Online Hate and Extremism in the Israel/Gaza Conflict”

Ursula Schmid “Legitimizing hostility through humor: Perceptions and effects of humorous hate speech on social media”

Broderick McDonald “Lawful but Awful: Borderline Content and Human Rights”

The Next Gen Academic Survival Workshop Series: Early Career Researcher Safety, Wellbeing and Ethics

VOX Pol Workshop: Tackling Online Extremism in Southern Asia

This workshop explores the digital extremist landscape in South and Southeast Asia and the challenges and responses to tackling online extremism. The workshop brings together experts and practitioners researching extremism across the ideological spectrum in Asia, to explore a broad range of issues, including but not limited to the current state of online extremism in South and Southeast Asia, the preferred platforms of the different online communities, the connections between these online spaces, how these online spaces are being used, the narratives found in extremist online content, intersections with narratives from other extremist communities globally, and the measures adopted by different security actors to counter online extremism.

Chair: Miraji Mohamed, CYTREC; Dublin City University

Speakers:

Ms Munira Mustaffa, Chasseur Group

Mr Janeen Fernando, United Nations

Mr Hari Prasad, CRITICA Research and Analysis

VOX-Pol Virtual Roundtable: Artificial Intelligence and Extremism, Wednesday 13 December.

(Please note, some slides are blurred due to sensitivities around ongoing research)

This roundtable is organized by the VOX-Pol Network of Excellence on online extremism in the context of the ExID, Extreme Identities, project funded by the EU Horizon2020 NORFACE programme, Democratic Governance in Turbulent Times. Over the past decade, two major phenomena have developed on the digital realm: the extensive growth of extremism on the internet and exponential improvements of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models. This VOX-Pol Roundtable examines the toxic encounter of these two evolutions, from five distinct perspectives offered by its chair and expert panellists, offering cutting-edge insights on issues such as AI-powered detection of radical content or deepfake use by extremist groups.

Chair

Dr Stephane J. BAELE is Professor of International Relations at the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium) and Honorary Associate Professor of Security and Political Violence at the University of Exeter (UK). The editor of ISIS Propaganda (Oxford University Press), his multidisciplinary work on extremist and violent political actors’ communications has appeared in leading journals such as the Journal of Conflict Resolution or Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. He recently published a CREST Guide on “Artificial Intelligence and Extremism: The Threat of Language Models for Propaganda Purposes” (2022).

Panelists

Dr Lewys BRACE is Senior Lecturer in Computational Social Science at the University of Exeter (UK), where he is the Co-Director of the Q-Step Centre for quantitative social sciences. His work, published in journals like Terrorism & Political Violence or the Journal of Policing, Intelligence & Counter-Terrorism, harnesses data science, Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT), and artificial intelligence methods to analyse extremism, terrorism, cybercrime, and security.

Dr Thomas HEGGHAMMER is Senior Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford (UK). A political scientist and historian specializing in militant Islamism and jihadism (e.g., Jihadi Culture, Jihad in Saudi Arabia, or recently Abdullah Azzam’s biography The Caravan) he has recently deployed computational/AI methods for the study of extremist corpora in Arabic (e.g., “daiR: an R package for OCR with Google Document AI” in the Journal of Open Source Software, and “OCR with Tesseract, Amazon Textract, and Google Document AI: a benchmarking experiment” in the Journal Computational Social Sciences).

Dr Miron LAKOMY is Professor at the Institute of Political Sciences of the University of Silesia (Poland) and currently visiting fellow at the ITSTIME research centre in Milan (Italy). He has held visiting positions at, among others, the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, the University of Milan, and the European University Institute. His research primarily focuses on various aspects of political violence and terrorism on the Internet, as well as military conflicts. He is, among others, the author of the recent article “Artificial Intelligence as a Terrorism Enabler?” (published in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism).

Ms Marie SCHRÖTER is since August the Country Director of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) in the Philippines (after working for FES in Tel Aviv). Before that, she focused on the role of AI in counterterrorism as a Mercator Fellow with the United Nations Office of Counter Terrorism in New York, the International Centre for the Study of Radicalization (ICSR) at the Kings College London, and AlgorithmWatch in Berlin. She is the co-founder (in 2020) of Codetekt – a civil society organization against online disinformation. She is, among others, the author of the report “Artificial Intelligence and Countering Violent Extremism: A Primer” (published by GNET in 2020).

VOX-Pol Guest Lecture Series, Autumn 2023

Name: Jade Hutchinson

Title: The Far-Right Online Ecosystem Outline: This presentation provides a conceptual and empirical overview of how networks of online platforms and devices shape Far-Right extremism and terrorism. Drawing on current PhD research into how online extremist ecosystems operate, issues of ecosystem conceptualisation, data collection, and the challenges associated with online ecosystem research are discussed.