Online Library

In setting out the work program for the past 12 months, the shared objective of the group was to collaborate across industry, government, and civil society “to map contentsharing algorithms and processes used by industry that may facilitate consumption of content that may increase user interest in or amplify terrorist and violent extremist content and consider positive interventions and risk mitigation points.” This report focuses on the second part of the objective in considering positive interventions and risk mitigation points. GIFCT’s mission is focused on preventing terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms. For the purposes of this work we have taken a content-agnostic approach and sought to map positive interventions already used in the countering violent extremism (CVE) space as well as those that have been used elsewhere but could be applied to CVE. The use of counter and alternative narratives is recognized as an online CVE mechanism for connecting users to alternative sources of information. Yet there is less awareness of the uses of other forms of positive interventions.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

Much research aims to detect online radical content mainly using
radicalisation glossaries, i.e., by looking for terms and expressions associated with
religion, war, offensive language, etc. However, such crude methods are highly
inaccurate towards content that uses radicalisation terminology to simply report on
current events, to share harmless religious rhetoric, or even to counter extremism.
Language is complex and the context in which particular terms are used should not
be disregarded. In this paper, we propose an approach for building a representation
of the semantic context of the terms that are linked to radicalised rhetoric. We
use this approach to analyse over 114K tweets that contain radicalisation-terms
(around 17K posted by pro-ISIS users, and 97k posted by “general” Twitter users).
We report on how the contextual information differs for the same radicalisationterms
in the two datasets, which indicate that contextual semantics can help to
better discriminate radical content from content that only uses radical terminology.
The classifiers we built to test this hypothesis outperform those that disregard
contextual information.

This study looks at how terror attacks are rendered discursively meaningful on social media through the concurrent use and reiteration of terror hashtags, which were created following previous incidents of terror. The article focuses on 12 terror attacks in Europe in 2015-2017 and their relating hashtags on Twitter, to see how various combinations of these were reused and co-articulated in tweets posted in relation to subsequent attacks. Through social network analysis of co-occurring hashtags in about 3 million tweets, in combination with close readings of a smaller sample, this study aims to analyze both the networks of hashtags in relation to terror attacks as well as the discursive process of hashtag co-articulation. The study shows that the patterns by which attack hashtags are reused and co-articulated depend on both temporal and contextual differences.

The Somali jihadi-insurgent movement Al-Shabab has established itself, since emerging in 2007 after the overthrow of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) umbrella in the wake of the December 2006 Ethiopian invasion and occupation of parts of Somalia, as one of the relatively few jihadi organizations to succeed in the capture, control, and governance of territory for a significant period of time. When Islamic State was masquerading as a «paper state» in 2008 and 2009, Al-Shabab’s leadership was busy constructing a bureaucracy of power, divided into regional and local nodes of authority, designed to implement and maintain insurgent rule over rapidly expanding territories. In establishing itself as a self-proclaimed and seemingly viable alternative governing authority, even if only in the short to medium term, Al Shabab continues to present a major challenge to the internationally recognized but weak and corrupt Somali Federal Government (SFG), the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), and the international community. The Somali insurgents, in successfully implementing a form of law and order, however harsh and philistine their interpretation of Islamic law and specifically their imposition of hudud («set») punishments for crimes such as highway robbery, banditry, theft, zina (various forms of fornication), and murder, provided other Sunni jihadi groups with an example of how jihadi-insurgent governance can be enacted in practice.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.