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This article’s objective is to categorize potential jihadists in Europe and provide an overview of contemporary methods for their recruitment. Taking into account the ubiquity of the Internet and social networking platforms, and the fact that younger generations are spending an ever increasing amount of time using contemporary communication technology, this article focuses on those recruitment methods that make use of social networking platforms and mobile applications for the spread of extremist propaganda, as well as for communication with potential adherents. An analysis of the age structure of individuals involved in the planning and carrying out of terrorist acts in Europe from November of 2015 to September of 2017 supports a hypothesis that contemporary recruitment methods are especially effective in targeting a younger demographic. In addition, this article negates the importance of traditional physical exposure to radical behavior, which serves to explain the increasing number of terrorist attacks in Europe conducted by radicalized citizens of European countries.

This paper uses a multimodal mixed methods approach for exploring general recontextualisation patterns of violent extremist images in online media. Specifically, the paper reports on the preliminary findings of a preliminary study which investigates various patterns in the reuse of images which appear in ISIS’s official propaganda magazines Dabiq and Rumiyah by others across various public online media platforms (e.g. news websites, social media news aggregates, blogs). Using a mixed methods approach informed by multimodal discourse analysis, and combined with data mining and information visualisation, the study addresses questions such as which types of images produced and used by ISIS in its propaganda magazines recirculate most frequently in other online media over time, on which types of online media these images reappear, and in which contexts they are used and reused on these websites, that is that is, whether the tone of the message is corporate (formal) or personal (informal). Preliminary findings from the study suggest different recontextualisation patterns for certain types of ISIS-related images of over time. The study also found that the majority of violent extremist images used in the sample analysis appear to circulate most frequently on Western news and politics websites and news aggregate platforms, in predominantly formal contexts.

Governments and companies are turning to automated tools to make sense of what people
post on social media, for everything ranging from hate speech detection to law enforcement
investigations. Policymakers routinely call for social media companies to identify and take
down hate speech, terrorist propaganda, harassment, “fake news” or disinformation, and
other forms of problematic speech. Other policy proposals have focused on mining social
media to inform law enforcement and immigration decisions. But these proposals wrongly
assume that automated technology can accomplish on a large scale the kind of nuanced
analysis that humans can accomplish on a small scale.

Social media platforms have recently seen an increase in the occurrence of hate speech discourse which has led to calls for improved detection methods. Most of these rely on annotated data, keywords, and a classification technique. While this approach provides good coverage, it can fall short when dealing with new terms produced by online extremist communities which act as original sources of words which have alternate hate speech meanings. These code words (which can be both created and adopted words) are designed to evade automatic detection and often have benign meanings in regular discourse. As an example, “skypes”, “googles”, and “yahoos” are all instances of words which have an alternate meaning that can be used for hate speech. This overlap introduces additional challenges when relying on keywords for both the collection of data that is specific to hate speech, and downstream classification. In this work, we develop a community detection approach for finding extremist hate speech communities and collecting data from their members. We also develop a word embedding model that learns the alternate hate speech meaning of words and demonstrate the candidacy of our code words with several annotation experiments, designed to determine if it is possible to recognize a word as being used for hate speech without knowing its alternate meaning. We report an inter-annotator agreement rate of K=0.871, and K=0.676 for data drawn from our extremist community and the keyword approach respectively, supporting our claim that hate speech detection is a contextual task and does not depend on a fixed list of keywords. Our goal is to advance the domain by providing a high quality hate speech dataset in addition to learned code words that can be fed into existing classification approaches, thus improving the accuracy of automated detection.

Does social media lead vulnerable individuals to resort to violence? Many people believe it
does. And they respond with online censorship, surveillance and counter-speech. But what
do we really know about the Internet as a cause, and what do we know about the impact
of these reactions? All over the world, governments and Internet companies are making
decisions on the basis of assumptions about the causes and remedies to violent attacks. The
challenge is to have analysis and responses firmly grounded. The need is for a policy that is
constructed on the basis of facts and evidence, and not founded on hunches – or driven by
panic and fearmongering.
It is in this context that UNESCO has commissioned the study titled Youth and Violent
Extremism on Social Media – Mapping the Research. This work provides a global mapping
of research (mainly during 2012-16) about the assumed roles played by social media in
violent radicalization processes, especially when they affect youth and women. The research
responds to the belief that the Internet at large is an active vector for violent radicalization
that facilitates the proliferation of violent extremist ideologies. Indeed, much research
shows that protagonists are indeed heavily spread throughout the Internet. There is a
growing body of knowledge about how terrorists use cyberspace. Less clear, however, is
the impact of this use, and even more opaque is the extent to which counter measures are
helping to promote peaceful alternatives. While Internet may play a facilitating role, it is not
established that there is a causative link between it and radicalization towards extremism,
violent radicalization, or the commission of actual acts of extremist violence.

Today, the Commission presents guidelines and principles to increase the proactive prevention, detection and removal of illegal content inciting hatred, violence and terrorism online. The increasing availability and spreading of terrorist material and content that incites violence and hatred online is a serious threat to the security and safety of EU citizens.