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The Counter-Terrorism Committee unanimously adopted the Delhi Declaration at the closing of its special meeting on countering the use of new and emerging technologies for terrorist purposes, held in India on 28-29 October 2022.

The special meeting focused on three main areas: unmanned aerial systems, terrorist financing and information and communications technologies. The meeting also examined overarching issues relating to the use of technologies for terrorist purposes, to include human rights, gender considerations, and future programming by the international community. The Delhi Declaration provides non-binding guidance to Member States and stakeholders in countering terrorist use of new and emerging technologies.

Scholarship has highlighted the rise of political influencer networks on YouTube, raising concerns about the platform’s propensity to spread and even incentivize politically extreme content. While many studies have focused on YouTube’s algorithmic infrastructure, limited research exists on the actual content in these networks. Building on Lewis’s (2018) classification of an “alternative influencer” network, we apply structural topic modeling across all text-based autocaptions from her study’s sample to identify common topics featured on these channels. This allows us to gauge which topics appear together and to trace politicization over time. Through network analysis, we determine channel similarities and evaluate whether deplatformed channels influenced topic shifts. We find that political topics increasingly dominate the focus of all analyzed channels. The convergence of culture and politics occurs mostly about identity-driven issues. Furthermore, more extreme channels do not form distinct clusters but blend into the larger content-based network. Our findings illustrate how political topics may function as connective ties across an initially more diverse network of YouTube influencer channels.

Approaches for strategically countering or providing alternatives to hate speech and extremism online have evolved substantively in the last ten years. Technological advancement and a generation of young activists who have been socialized as digital natives have facilitated a maelstrom of both hate-based extremist content and attempts to counter this material in different guises and through diverse channels. The rate and pace of change within the tech sector, and social media growth in particular, have meant that although counterspeech is now more prevalent than ever before, it requires greater guidance and more robust public–private partnerships to effectively prevent and counter extremism online. The chapter embraces a cross-platform and international overview of some of the best practices within efforts to prevent and counter violent extremism online and discusses the future of counterspeech with recommendations for expanded innovation and partnership models.

On October 27th, 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter, becoming its new CEO and firing many top executives in the process. Musk listed fewer restrictions on content moderation and removal of spam bots among his goals for the platform. Given findings of prior research on moderation and hate speech in online communities, the promise of less strict content moderation poses the concern that hate will rise on Twitter. We examine the levels of hate speech and prevalence of bots before and after Musk’s acquisition of the platform. We find that hate speech rose dramatically upon Musk purchasing Twitter and the prevalence of most types of bots increased, while the prevalence of astroturf bots decreased.

This research paper examines and assesses how members of the Somali jihadi insurgent group al-Shabaab have attempted to influence the mass media for strategic communications purposes. Using the group’s activities between the years 2005 and 2017 as a case study, this paper asserts that al-Shabaab’s attempts to influence the mass media for news coverage purposes, despite its own operational security concerns since it withdrew from Mogadishu in 2011, is forward-looking, fast-paced, aggressive, and by and large successful. But the conclusions also assert that despite the group’s focused strategic communications and its opportunistic use of Propaganda of the Deed, its successes correlate directly to the failure of the poor and generally uncoordinated communications efforts of the international coalition working to counter it. The generally poor handling of strategic communications by an expensive combination of the Somali government, the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM), the United Nations (UN), and some members of the international community has allowed the strategic communications of al-Shabaab a relatively free, unchecked, and unchallenged passage. In some cases related to major attacks, al-Shabaab’s strategic communications are even viewed by members of the mass media as more authentic, realistic, timely, and truthful, than those of those of the coalition working to counter it.