Online Library

VOX-Pol Blog post.

Facebook serves more than 1.5 billion people globally. Although the majority of people use the site for positive purposes, there are some who use the platform in negative ways. With that in mind, Facebook has created a set of policies – its Community Standards – detailing what type of content people can and cannot post. For instance, Facebook prohibits and removes hate speech and does not allow dangerous organisations (defined as groups that engage in terrorist or organised criminal activity) to have a presence on Facebook. Content that supports or promotes those groups is removed. However, sometimes people post content which other users may consider hateful or extreme, but which does not violate Facebook’s policies.

To counter this type of disagreeable or extremist content, Facebook has publicly stated that it believes counter-speech is not only potentially more effective, but also more likely to succeed in the long run. Counter-speech is a common, crowd-sourced response to extremist or hateful content. Extreme posts are often met with disagreement, derision and countercampaigns.

Combating extremism in this way has some advantages: it is faster, more flexible and responsive, and capable of dealing with extremism from anywhere and in any language; and it retains the principle of free and open public spaces for debate. However, the forms counter-speech takes are as varied as the extremism it argues against. It is also likely that it is not always as effective as it could be; and some types of counter-speech could potentially even be counter-productive. In the light of its belief in the power of counter-speech and the growing interest in a more rigorous and evidence-led approach to understanding it better, Facebook commissioned Demos to undertake this research report, examining the extent to which different types of counter-speech are produced and shared on Facebook.

Beyond the familiar online world that most of us inhabit lies a vast network of sites, communities and cultures where freedom is pushed to its limits. A world that is as creative and complex as it is dangerous and disturbing. A world that is much closer than you think. The Dark Net is a revelatory examination of the internet today, and of its most innovative and dangerous.

There are increasing calls to curtail or revoke Section 230, a 1996 law that protects internet companies from most lawsuits related to user-generated content. Critics of Section 230 say it discourages vigilant self-regulation. Proponents counter that the law has fostered free expression and innovation. Our report concludes that Section 230 ought to be preserved but significantly amended.

This article offers a bottom-up understanding of the media strategy employed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) as it relates to the production and dissemination of its hostage execution videos. Through an empirical analysis of sixty-two videos of executions produced by ISIL in the year following its establishment as the “Islamic State” in 2014, this study examines the videos as a major component of ISIL’s media strategy. Through these media products, ISIL seeks to spread a political message aimed at both local and global, ingroup and outgroup consumption through audience segmentation, while striving to influence both local and global audiences through the use and production of graphic violence. This article also discusses the strategy governing the production and release of ISIL’s execution videos; how it relies on the global media to transmit its intertwined political and religious agenda in the digital media age.

Academics are increasingly expected to use social media to disseminate their work and knowledge to public audiences. Although this has various advantages, particularly for alternative forms of dissemination, the web can also be an unsafe space for typically oppressed or subordinated groups. This article presents two auto-ethnographic accounts of the abuse and hate academics researching oppressed groups, namely, women and people of Muslim faith, experienced online. In doing so, this article falls into four parts. The first section provides an overview of existing literature, particularly focusing on work which explores the violence and abuse of women and people of Muslim faith online. The second section considers the auto-ethnographic methodological approach adopted in this article. The third section provides the auto-ethnographic accounts of the author’s experiences of hate and abuse online. The final section locates these experiences within broader theoretical concepts, such as silencing, and considers possible implications of such online hate in both an academic context and beyond.