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Cooperation between law enforcement and tech companies is widely regarded as necessary to tackle online terrorist content. Both sectors have publicly stated their commitment to working together and there are examples of mutual cooperation. Yet there are also impediments to such collaboration, including different cultures and operating practices, and there have been high-profile instances of non-cooperation. The informality of existing collaborations has also led to concerns about censorship, mission creep and a lack of accountability and oversight.

The focus of this report is on how to resolve the impediments to closer cooperation between law enforcement and the tech sector in order to realise the benefits of mutual collaboration, while simultaneously addressing concerns about due process and accountability. The report utilises an interview-based methodology to examine the experiences and opinions of personnel from both sectors who have first-hand experience of mutual cooperation. It provides empirically grounded insights into this under-researched topic.

Unlike one-to-one threats, terrorist threat texts constitute a form of violence and a language crime that is committed in a complex context of public intimidation, and are communicated publicly and designed strategically to force desired sociopolitical changes . Contributing to law enforcement and threat assessors’ fuller understanding of the discursive nature of threat texts in terrorism context, this paper examines how language is used dialogically to communicate threats and to construct both the purpose of threatened actions and the victims. The paper uses a critical discourse analytic approach and takes a set of eleven digital threat texts made by two jihadists as a case study. It draws on van Dijk’s concept of ideology , the law enforcement-based taxonomy of threat types as reported by Napier and Mardigian , van Leeuwen’s model of social actor representation and discursive construction of purpose of social actions , and Martin and White’s Engagement system . The analysis reveals victims specified and genericised, excluded and adversary. This linguistic construction is underpinned by a dichotomous conceptualisation of the social actors’ affiliations, positions, values, cultural activities, goals, and material and symbolic resources. The threats are delivered to the victims, agents acting on their behalf (e.g. security forces) or property associated with them (e.g. oil refinery), and are of two primary types—direct, and veiled. The former are predominant and serve inter alia to augment the public-intimidation impact of terrorist discourse. Threatened violence is of goal-, means- and/or effect-oriented social purposes, which suggest a categorisation of threats based on these purposes. The analysis reveals a dialectic, refutative nature of argumentation, and a discourse pregnant with heteroglossic utterances that contract (i) to close off and disalign with state officials’ contradictory voices, and (ii) to produce tension, providing clues to terrorists’ motivations and what constitutes the heart of political violence.

Given that terrorism is omnipresent on social media, it is imperative to study how seeing terror content online is related to individuals’ attitudes, behaviors, and emotions. This study investigates how exposure to terrorism on social media associates with terror-related online self-disclosure and how self-disclosure, in turn, relates to fear of terrorism. A quota-based survey of young social media users (16- to 25-year-olds; N = 864) in Germany revealed that exposure to Islamist and far-right terrorism is related to higher online self-disclosure. Political ideology moderated the relationship between exposure to far-right terrorism and online self-disclosure, but not when exposed to Islamist terrorism. Attitudinal differentiation was negatively associated with self-disclosure. Additionally, we found an interaction effect of exposure to Islamist terrorism and attitudinal differentiation on self-disclosure. Finally, the results showed that online self-disclosure was positively related to fear of terrorism. By and large, our findings highlight the relevance of social media for the levels of fear.

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.