Online Library

This paper presents the first criminological analysis of an online social reaction to a crime event of national significance, in particular the detection and propagation of cyberhate on social media following a terrorist attack. We take the Woolwich, London terrorist attack in 2013 as our event of interest and draw on Cohen’s process of warning, impact, inventory and reaction to delineate a sequence of incidents that come to constitute a series of deviant responses following the attack. This paper adds to contemporary debates in criminology and the study of hate crime in three ways: (1) it provides the first analysis of the escalation, duration, diffusion and de-escalation of cyberhate in social media following a terrorist event; (2) it applies Cohen’s work on action, reaction and amplification and the role of the traditional media to the online context and (3) it introduces and provides a case study in ‘computational criminology’.

Hateful and antagonistic content published and propagated via the World Wide Web has the potential to cause harm and suffering on an individual basis, and lead to social tension and disorder beyond cyber space. Despite new legislation aimed at prosecuting those who misuse new forms of communication to post threatening, harassing, or grossly offensive language – or cyber hate – and the fact large social media companies have committed to protecting their users from harm, it goes largely unpunished due to difficulties in policing online public spaces. To support the automatic detection of cyber hate online, specifically on Twitter, we build multiple individual models to classify cyber hate for a range of protected characteristics including race, disability and sexual orientation. We use text parsing to extract typed dependencies, which represent syntactic and grammatical relationships between words, and are shown to capture ‘othering’ language – consistently improving machine classification for different types of cyber hate beyond the use of a Bag of Words and known hateful terms. Furthermore, we build a data-driven blended model of cyber hate to improve classification where more than one protected characteristic may be attacked (e.g. race and sexual orientation), contributing to the nascent study of intersectionality in hate crime.

It is an obvious and undeniable fact, that the cyberspace is become a powerful method which is increasingly and quickly utilized by terrorist organizations to achieve their gruesome and nefarious goals by hitting innocent individuals. This paper has conducted a critical and comprehensive study on the literature review aiming to answer several inquiries about utilization of cyberspace by terrorist groups and the applicability of the Malaysian law on terrorism. The meaning, characteristics and goals of cyber terrorism will be highlighted.
Furthermore, this paper will clarify how terrorist groups invade the cyberspace with highlighting on “ISIS” as an example. In addition, this paper will indicate how the Malaysian Law addresses the terrorism. This paper has proved that the terrorist groups become more sophisticated and complex by adopting the cyberspace. Moreover, this paper discloses how terrorist groups exploit the cyberspace. Even if Malaysian law adopts many measures and precautions to counter terrorism, but, it still needs more efforts to deal with terrorism, by regulating the “Bitcoins”, introducing a clear definition about the meaning of “lethal device” to encompass harm programs and viruses, and distinguishing between clicking “like” or sharing the terrorist items with use explicit words to glorify the terrorism and without use any explicit glorification words. The lawgiver must take into consideration the possession of terrorist items orpublications for academic and innocent purposes. Finally, under SOSMA, the power to intercept the communications must be subjected on the judicial oversight and the power of arrest must be based on objective test.

Documentary: Isis and The Internet premieres Friday April 1st at 10pm ET on MSNBC.

President Obama reiterated his promise to destroy the virulent Islamic State Tuesday while talking about the Orlando mass shooting — and how gunman Omar Mateen, a U.S. citizen, may have been radicalized by online extremist propaganda. NewsHour producer P.J. Tobia reports on U.S. efforts to win the hearts and minds that the terrorists are trying to co-opt on the Internet.