Online Library

VOX-Pol Blog post.

Although a plethora of literature exists on hate or extremist group activity, the role of racist women remains an unexplored area. The current study sought to explore one method of communication for racist women, the Internet. The researchers conducted a content analysis on 227 discussion threads provided on one of the oldest extremist websites on the Internet, Stormfront. The purpose of this study was to investigate the content of the discussion threads described as ‘For Stormfront Ladies Only.’ Of primary interest to the researchers was whether the content discussed by women in this ‘White Nationalist’ cyber community supported the assertion by some scholars that the role of women in racist activities is undergoing a transformation and the implications of this study in that regard are discussed.

The PKK/KONGRA-GEL terrorist group makes extensive use of the internet, notably for propaganda. The prominent PKK websites are listed in a dataset which shows the way these sites relate to each other with links. An overview of their content is given, then various software and analysis tools, notably Unicet, are used to reveal different aspects of this network of Websites; Centrality Analyses to show prominence and hierarchical structure, Density and Geodesic Distances Analyses, and Connectivity Analyses.

Governments and companies are turning to automated tools to make sense of what people
post on social media, for everything ranging from hate speech detection to law enforcement
investigations. Policymakers routinely call for social media companies to identify and take
down hate speech, terrorist propaganda, harassment, “fake news” or disinformation, and
other forms of problematic speech. Other policy proposals have focused on mining social
media to inform law enforcement and immigration decisions. But these proposals wrongly
assume that automated technology can accomplish on a large scale the kind of nuanced
analysis that humans can accomplish on a small scale.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

We analyze 26.2 million comments published in Arabic language on Twitter, from July 2014 to January 2015, when Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)’s strength reached its peak and the group was prominently expanding the territorial area under its control. By doing that, we are able to measure the share of support and aversion toward the Islamic State within the online Arab communities. We then investigate two specific topics. First, by exploiting the time granularity of the tweets, we link the opinions with daily events to understand the main determinants of the changing trend in support toward ISIS. Second, by taking advantage of the geographical locations of tweets, we explore the relationship between online opinions across countries and the number of foreign fighters joining ISIS.