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We are delighted to announce the launch of the final report of the Mechachal project, one of first academic studies to contextually examine how hate speech emerges and disseminates in social media.

Focusing on Ethiopia, and in collaboration with Addis Ababa University, the research team examined thousands of comments made by Ethiopians on Facebook during four months around the time of the country’s general election. Hate speech’ –defined as statements to incite others to discriminate or act against individuals or groups on grounds of their ethnicity, nationality, religion or gender – was found in just 0.7% of overall statements in the representative sample. The paper says the findings may have wide implications for the many countries trying to address growing concerns about the role played by social media in promoting radicalisation or violence.

Ethiopia represented an exceptional case study because of its distinct languages, which allowed the research team to gain a realistic sample of the overall online debates focused on one country. The research team analysed Facebook statements made by Ethiopians, both in their homeland and abroad, in the run-up to and just after the general election on 24 May 2015. Fans or followers, rather than people with any real influence online, were found to be mainly responsible for the violent or aggressive speech that appeared on Facebook pages in the sample.

It appears these individuals use Facebook to vent their anger against more powerful sections of society. Around 18% of total comments in the sample were written by fans or followers compared with 11% of comments made by highly influential speakers (the owners of web pages). One fifth (21.8%) of hostile comments were grounded in political differences, only slightly higher than the overall average of 21.4% of all conversations containing hostile comments. Religion and ethnicity provoked fewer hostile comments (10% and 14% of overall comments in sample respectively).

Anno Bunnik explores the ramifications of Big Data for countering terrorism, extremism, and radicalisation. With the recent rise of jihadists and other extremists groups in the Middle East and Europe, how do state agencies respond through the use of Big Data? This chapter critically engages with questions such as the extent to which Big Data can inform us about and help prevent radicalisation. It deals with the role of non-governmental organisations and the private sector in this regard. Bunnik makes the argument that whilst it is inevitable that Big Data will take centre stage in counter-terrorism, its potential should also be utilised to better understand radicalisation and extremism.

A popular stereotype is that women will play more minor roles than men as environments become more dangerous and aggressive. Our analysis of new longitudinal data sets from offline and online operational networks [for example, ISIS (Islamic State)] shows that although men dominate numerically, women emerge with superior network connectivity that can benefit the underlying system’s robustness and survival. Our observations suggest new female-centric approaches that could be used to affect such networks. They also raise questions about how individual contributions in high-pressure systems are evaluated.

Given the proliferation of violent extremist content online in recent years, developing effective counter-narratives – messages that offer a positive alternative to extremist propaganda, or deconstruct or delegitimise extremist narratives and challenge extremist ideologies – is an increasingly necessary alternative to online censorship. This Handbook, funded by Public Safety Canada through the Kanishka Project, was created by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) to help anyone looking to proactively respond to extremist propaganda with counter-narrative campaigns, and is intended as a beginner’s guide for those with little or no previous experience of counter-narrative campaigning. It takes readers through the main stages of creating, launching and evaluating an effective c ounter-narrative c ampaign. I t c an a lso b e u sed a longside I SD’s freely available online Counter-narrative Toolkit, which can be found at www.counternarratives.org. Our advice is based on ISD’s experiences in creating, running and evaluating in-house campaigns such as Extreme Dialogue, and collaborating with independent content-creators, from civil society and NGO campaigners to young activists, to amplify their counter-narrative messages through training, networking and campaign support. This Handbook therefore focuses on civil-society, youth or NGO-led online counternarrative campaigns.

There is a tendency in scholarly and strategic-policy fields to see the propaganda produced by groups like Islamic State and Al-Qaeda as historically unheralded. As evidence, slickly produced communiques and a penchant for using social media are typically highlighted. This narrow perspective, in placing the current phenomenon into an historical and thematic vacuum, infers that history has little to offer contemporary efforts to understand and confront extremist propaganda. This research paper explores the history of propaganda during conflict and draws out key lessons for improving counterterrorism strategic communications. Overall, history suggests that a strategic communications campaign during conflict is more likely to succeed if it based on a multifaceted approach characterised by the deployment of a diversity of messages that leverage a variety of target audience motivations, uses all pertinent means of communication (not just the latest), and synchronises this messaging with strategicpolicy/politico-military actions.

With the rise of the Islamic State (IS), a great deal of attention has recently been drawn to two issues that have come to be seen as intricately linked: the role of women within pro-jihadist networks (Lahoud 2014; Hoyle, Bradford and Frenett 2015; Saltman and Smith 2015) and the use of social media as an indoctrination and recruitment tool by terrorist organizations (Weimann 2008; Bloom 2013; Klausen 2015). The present working paper is an attempt at improving our understanding of women’s participation in online jihadist networks through examination of the nature and scope of their activities within pro-IS and pro-AQ Twitter networks. To explore that participation, we look at women’s activities online through two different methodological lenses: a. by looking at gender in relation to female tweeting patterns; and b. by examining the content of women’s posts within and across two distinct pro-jihadist networks, one associated with IS, and the other comprised of women from various al-Qaeda (AQ)-affiliated groups.