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VOX-Pol Blog post.

This is a formal commentary, responding to Matthew Curran Benigni, Kenneth Joseph, and Kathleen Carley’s contribution, “Online extremism and the communities that sustain it: Detecting the ISIS supporting community on Twitter”. This brief review reflects on the ethics of big data research methodologies, and how novel methods complicate long-standing principles of research ethics. Specifically, the concept of the “data subject” as a corollary, or replacement, of “human subject” is considered.

This article argues that similarities between jihadism and far-right radicalism are increasing, particularly with regard to the spectacularisation of violence. Spectacularisation means representing and performing violence in the form of a show, for instance through live-streaming, with a renewed emphasis on captivating symbols and much less attention paid to the ideological foundations on which the radical project is supposed to rely. After the March 2019 shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, the spectacularisation of racist, anti-Islamic and anti-Semitic violence increased, thus consolidating that event as a turning point in the evolution of the contemporary far right and the history of jihadism—which has far-right affinities. Lured by the performance of violence, the number of contemporary far-right sympathisers is steadily growing in a virtual environment that closely resembles that of jihadists, where patterns and mechanisms of online recruitment and grooming are proliferating.

This article’s objective is to categorize potential jihadists in Europe and provide an overview of contemporary methods for their recruitment. Taking into account the ubiquity of the Internet and social networking platforms, and the fact that younger generations are spending an ever increasing amount of time using contemporary communication technology, this article focuses on those recruitment methods that make use of social networking platforms and mobile applications for the spread of extremist propaganda, as well as for communication with potential adherents. An analysis of the age structure of individuals involved in the planning and carrying out of terrorist acts in Europe from November of 2015 to September of 2017 supports a hypothesis that contemporary recruitment methods are especially effective in targeting a younger demographic. In addition, this article negates the importance of traditional physical exposure to radical behavior, which serves to explain the increasing number of terrorist attacks in Europe conducted by radicalized citizens of European countries.

Acute crisis events ranging from natural disasters to terrorist incidents now tend to generate an almost immediate response from social media users. This is especially pronounced on Twitter, due to that platform’s specific affordances as a particularly open and real-time medium. While analyses of such events have increased over recent years, we still understand relatively little about the way in which audiovisual materials relating to such crises are circulated and what they contribute to processes of witnessing. This is important, however, in an increasingly visual age when audiovisual material tends to be more widely viewed and shared than plain-text updates, and thus has a greater potential to influence viewers’ interpretations of an event. To address this gap in our understanding, this article investigates the distribution dynamics of audiovisual content on Twitter in the immediate aftermath of terror attacks in Paris and Brussels. Results point to the importance of broadening conceptualisations of conflict-related visuals and the ongoing relevance of affective content in such material. Furthermore, this article argues that contexts of time and space are crucial to consider, as is the role that individual actors – both human and non-human – play in disseminating such content.

VOX-Pol Blog post.