Online Library

VOX-Pol Blog post.

Any intervention in the violent acts of terrorist groups requires accurate differentiation among the groups themselves, which has largely been overlooked in their study beyond qualitative work. To explore the notion of terrorist group differentiation, the online communication of six violent groups were collected: Al-Nusrah Front, al-Qa’ida Central, al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula, Hamas, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and Taliban. All six groups embedded their ideology in digitised documents that were shared through multiple online social networks and media platforms in attempts to influence individuals to identify with their beliefs. The way these groups constructed social roles for their supporters in their ideology was proposed as a novel way to differentiate them and key term extraction was used to find important terms referenced in their communication. Experimental classification was devised to find the highest-ranking roles capable of prediction. Role terms produced high accuracy scores across experiments differentiating the groups (95%CI: 95–98%), with varying inter-group and intra-ideological differences emerging from authority-, religion-, closeness-, and conflict-based social roles. This suggests these constructs possess strong predictive potential to separate terrorist groups through nuanced expressions observed in their communication behaviour and advances our understanding of how these groups deploy harmful ideology.

This paper observes some of the most distinguished characteristics of the Islamic State related to the use of modern technology and tries to drawn some important conclusions between the terrorist’s quasi state, modernity and technology. After the examination of the functioning of IS at the peak of its powers between 2014 and 2017, the analysis turns to terrorists’ various online activities. All of them are showing the Islamic State’s reliance on modern technology, especially IT, as one of the most important aspects of its terrorist activities that greatly contributed not only to the effectiveness, but to the essential definition of first modern terrorist quasi-state. The second part of the paper deals with the Islamic State`s fully reliance on technology in its own legitimization (both among Islamist rivals and “infidels”). The celebration and the fascination with modern technology as main IS characteristics make it different from other Islamist terrorist groups, and trying to establish relations between modernity and terrorism based on religious fundamentalism. The paper also tries to find answers to the question whether IS’s ultra-modern techno approach is responsible for its transformation from a classical fundamentalist terrorist group into some kind of modern political ideology and a social movement with totalitarian and murderous characteristics.

The last half century has witnessed a burgeoning information revolution that has transformed our societies beyond recognition. The development of sophisticated computing, the technological reorientation of vast segments of the global workforce, the invention of the internet and most recently the proliferation of social media technology has radically changed the ways we work, live, develop and communicate. Political extremism and violent radicalism have not been excluded from this growing trend, with social media being used as a tool for the recruitment and exploitation of young people by extremist groups.

As a result, the development of digital citizenship in our young people, to help them navigate these new online challenges, has become an urgent need. British schools are responsible for identifying and building resilience against radicalisation as part of their duty of care. Many of the skills required to combat the influence of extremism and the ability of terrorist groups to exploit and manipulate young people are already taught in schools, through existing personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) education and citizenship efforts, the British values agenda and the work of individual school leaders and teachers. However, there is a dearth of high-quality resources designed to increase the resilience of young people to extremism and radicalisation in a digital context.

This report summarises the results of a pilot project which seeks to address this gap by developing, testing and evaluating new resources to help schools tackle online radicalisation. Based on the analysis of a survey of existing materials and a best practise review, it presents a digital citizenship intervention, developed by Demos and Bold Creative, designed to build this resilience to extremism, and measures its impact through a pilot study delivered in schools. At a time when the growth of social media combined with the influence of extremism makes it more important than ever, this report adds to the public evidence base regarding counter-extremism interventions in a school context, and contributes to the development of effective education for digital citizens.

In the West, the concern surrounding the rise of online harassment, trolling and other malicious and antisocial behaviors tend to be hyper focused on websites like 4chan, 8chan and reddit. However, the rise of online hate culture that laid the groundwork for movements like Gamergate and the alt right has a precedent in Japan – specifically, the culture that was borne out of the 2channel text board, which was the inspiration for the American 4chan. As society decayed around many Japanese in the 1990s (an economic recession, terrorist attacks, earthquakes, to name a few events), the Internet came to prominence in the form of Bulletin Board Systems. Despite its lasting impact and influence on digital culture more globally, it is understudied and ignored in larger discussions around trolling, harassment, and online hate. Using a case study of the anti-Korean manga Kenkanryu and through the lens of Cynical Romanticism, this essay examines the ways that 2channel and the netto uyoku (the Japanese extreme far right) created a digital subculture that has had a lasting impact on global online hate. Though the netto uyoku never achieved significant successes in terms of actual societal and political change, what they did leave behind is a blueprint for online reactionaries.

Until 2016, Twitter was the online platform of choice for
English-language Islamic State (IS) sympathizers. As a
result of Twitter’s counter-extremism policies – including
content removal – there has been a decline in activity
by IS supporters. This outcome may suggest the company’s
efforts have been effective, but a deeper analysis
reveals a complex, nonlinear portrait of decay. Such observations
show that the fight against IS in the digital
sphere is far from over. In order to examine this change
over time, this report collects and reviews 845,646
tweets produced by 1,782 English-language pro-IS accounts
from February 15, 2016 to May 1, 2017.