Online Library

This report analyses public-private relations between the European (in particular, French) authorities and Facebook, Google (YouTube) and Twitter on the subject of terrorist usage of social media between 2015 and 2019. In a qualitative approach, interview material is mobilised to investigate lived experiences of this early cooperation, focusing on how stakeholders defined and negotiated their involvement, navigated power relations and pursued strategies to establish working relations without abandoning their respective preferences. The report finds that, although cultural fault lines influenced the stakeholders’ perceptions of roles, enthusiasm for ‘automated’ moderation was shared across the public-private boundary, justifying the development of what can be called state-platform diplomacy.

This paper critically examines the role of social media algorithms in amplifying terrorist recruitment efforts in Northern Nigeria. It argues that while platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter) are designed to optimize user engagement, their algorithmic logic often favors sensational and polarizing content including extremist propaganda. Terrorist groups such as Boko Haram and ISWAP have increasingly exploited this digital ecosystem to radicalize and recruit disaffected youth by leveraging local grievances, distorted religious narratives, and emotionally charged media. The paper highlights how the underlying socioeconomic conditions in Northern Nigeria-marked by poverty, youth unemployment, and low education-make the region especially vulnerable to digital radicalization. It also critiques the double standards in how tech platforms respond swiftly to extremism in Western contexts but lag in addressing similar threats in Africa due to inadequate content moderation infrastructure and lack of regional engagement. As a way forward, the paper calls for multistakeholder interventions including digital literacy integration in education, improved collaboration between Nigerian authorities and tech companies, and targeted investment in counter-narratives and economic empowerment programs. In an age where algorithms shape ideologies, combating terrorism in Nigeria requires not only military strategies but also digital vigilance, corporate accountability, and inclusive governance.

This work explores personalities of individuals at risk of Islamist radicalisation. Previous studies have successfully identified radicalised individuals on social media. However, a more prophylactic approach to counter radical communities would be to detect individuals prior to getting radicalised. A manually annotated dataset of 15,195 tweets from 259 persons believed to be at risk of radicalisation was classified according to Big 5 personality traits and compared to the same number of non-radical users. The results show that risk users can successfully be identified and exhibit distributional differences compared to non-radical users for Extraversion and Openness.

Gore-related websites enable the hosting and sharing of illegal videos, including those produced by proscribed terrorist entities. The websites are numerous, free to access, provide no user or child safety features, and have seen a growth in visitor numbers in recent years due to ongoing conflicts. Most gore-related websites offer download and social media share functionality allowing for graphic content, including 1000s showing terrorist violence, to be shared across social media.

This systematic review explores the utilization of crowdsourcing for geoinformation in enhancing awareness and mitigating terrorism-related disasters. Out of 519 studies identified in the database search, 108 were deemed eligible for analysis. We focused on articles employing various forms of crowdsourcing platforms, such as Twitter (now known as X), Facebook, and Telegram, across three distinct phases of terrorism-related disasters: monitoring and detection, onset, and post-incident analysis. Notably, we placed particular emphasis on the integration of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms in studying crowdsourced terrorism geoinformation to assess the current state of research and propose future directions. The findings revealed that Twitter emerged as the predominant crowdsourcing platform for terrorism-related information. Despite the prevalence of natural language processing for data mining, the majority of studies did not incorporate ML algorithms in their analyses. This preference for qualitative research methods can be attributed to the multifaceted nature of terrorism, spanning security, governance, politics, religion, and law. Our advocacy is for increased studies from the domains of geography, earth observation, and big data. Simultaneously, we encourage advancements in existing ML algorithms to enhance the accurate real-time detection of planned and onset terrorism disasters.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a radicalized group that has the goal of building an Islamic caliphate globally. ISIS recruits its members globally and spreads the extremism narrative widely. ISIS recruits more men to fulfill their roles as fighters and martyrs, but the role of women is also needed in ISIS activities as a supporting capacity in every activity carried out by jihadists. The involvement of women is seen as quite effective in polarizing radicalism, because women will continue the descendants of the next generation of ISIS and have a higher humanist and cognitive spirit than men. For this reason, it is interesting to study the radicalization process carried out by ISIS on women, propaganda, and the pattern of approach. This research uses a qualitative approach to gain an understanding of how transnational networks of the ISIS movement influence women and encourage women to join acts of terrorism through propaganda and extremism narratives. It was found that ISIS spreads its ideological narrative through offline and online channels where the basis of its approach is more towards an emotional intelligence approach related to social identity. ISIS uses many social media instruments in the process of spreading its ideology, so a strategy that focuses on a multidimensional and gender-valued approach that involves the entire spectrum of society needed, including governments, civil society, and families, as well as interstate cooperation to prevent polarization of ISIS ideology to women, such as internalization of education and gender equality.