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The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) Transparency Working Group (WG) was established in April 2020 as part of the GIFCT substantive Working Group structure. The Transparency WG’s objective is to develop best practices and easy access to resources that facilitate greater transparency from all relevant stakeholders while respecting privacy and human rights. Microsoft and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) representatives serve as co-leads for the WG. In support of its objective, a priority output for the WG is to provide recommendations to the GIFCT intended to help enhance the transparency of the organization and its activities. This report sets out those recommendations
as of June 2021.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

This article examines how Da‘esh utilizes anashid (“Islamic songs” or “recitation”) as soundtrack elements within its video messaging, focusing primarily on a sample set of 755 videos released in 2015. The authors also present the development of an automatic content recognition (ACR) tool that enabled them to engage this large data set. The article then explores the possibilities of ACR for the identification of terrorist audio and video, utilizing the conclusions drawn from the trends of audio usage in Da‘esh video messaging to support the validity and promise of such an approach.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

The theoretical literature from criminology, social movements, and political sociology, among others, includes diverging views about how political outcomes could affect movements. Many theories argue that political defeats motivate the losing side to increase their mobilization while other established models claim the winning side may feel encouraged and thus increase their mobilization. We examine these diverging perspectives in the context of the extreme right online and recent presidential elections by measuring the effect of the 2008 and 2016 election victories of Obama and Trump on the volume of postings on the largest white supremacy web-forum. ARIMA time series using intervention modeling showed a significant and sizable increase in the total number of posts and right-wing extremist posts but no significant change for firearm posts in either election year. However, the volume of postings for all impact measures was highest for the 2008 election.