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VOX-Pol Blog Post.

Four of the world’s largest Internet companies pledged to monitor, combat, and prevent terrorists from using their social media platforms to conduct operations in May 2016. One month later, Twitter, Facebook, and Google were sued for deaths caused by the Islamic State in 2015, and their alleged allowance and facilitation of terrorist communication. A growing demand for responsible and accountable online governance calls into question the global norms of cybersecurity and jurisdiction, and the very definition of terrorism. This paper explores the legislative precedent for countering terrorist communications, including the evolution of the First Amendment, communications and information law, and limitations governed by public opinion. Using legal trajectories to analyze aspects of monitoring and censorship in both past and current counterterrorism strategies, evidence of the future cyber landscape becomes clear. Cyber norms will imminently and inevitably depend on public-private partnerships, with liability split between the government and the private companies that control the majority of the world’s information flows. It is imperative for actors to identify each sector’s competing and corollary priorities, as well as their legal and normative restrictions, to form partnerships that can survive the unpredictable court of public opinion and provide sustainable counterterrorism solutions.

In this article, we propose an original method combining large-scale network and lexicometric analysis to link identifiable communities of Twitter users with the main discursive themes they used in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, France in 2015. We used this method to compare tweets and user networks in French and in English. We observed that the majority of the users who tweeted about Charlie Hebdo were people without any particular affiliation, who were shocked by the attacks and immediately expressed themselves through emotionally charged messages. But rather quickly their proportion decreased and they participated less in politically polarizing discussions. On the other hand, we found that smaller, highly politicized, and polarized groups had similar attitudes toward the events: they were less engaged immediately after the attacks in emotional expression of sympathy and shock, but they participated vividly in the following days in polemical discussions or engaged themes. Other findings include the central position of mainstream media and the existence of groups of users that aggregated on the basis of nationality. More generally, our results show clearly that even the most dramatic events such as a terrorist attack with innocent victims do not produce homogeneous reactions online. Rather, political engagement and cultural dispositions are keys to understand different attitudes on Twitter.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

There has been a notable increase in support for far-right ideologies across the West. The seriousness of this threat has been acknowledged by the UK government which has banned certain far-right groups using terrorism legislation. While criminological theories have been useful in explaining general criminality, they have been under-utilised in explaining extremism and terrorism. Agnew’s General Strain Theory, which hypothesises that negative life events increase the chance of a turn to criminality, is explored in this article alongside Control Theory. Based on a survey (N 1,138) conducted on Facebook in late 2019, we explore how strain and resilience based on participants’ gender, economic situations, life events and their use of the internet impacts individuals’ far-right extremist attitudes and behaviours. We use regression analysis to investigate the impact that strain and resilience, individuals’ gender, economic situations, individual life experiences, and their use of the internet have on their propensity to associate, engage, and support far-right ideologies and linked violence. While strain is not found to be significant, resilience, gender and the use of the internet are.

The jihadist groups AQAP, ISIS, and the Taliban have all produced glossy English magazines designed to influence Western sympathizers. We examine these magazines empirically with respect to models of the intensity of informative, imaginative, deceptive, jihadist, and gamification language. This allows their success to be estimated and their similarities and differences to be exposed. We also develop and validate an empirical model of propaganda; according to this model Dabiq, ISIS’s magazine ranks highest of the three.