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The ‘Great Migration’: Recent Accelerationist Efforts to Switch Social Media Platforms
January 18, 2023By Charlie Winter Since Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in October, there has been much conjecture about how its changes in policy, particularly in relation to the reinstatement of accounts belonging to prominent white supremacists and conspiracy theorists, will make Twitter a new core arena for extreme right wing (ERW) messaging and outreach. Notably, this ...
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Spreading Hate and Violence: The Link between Online Vitriol and Terrorism
January 11, 2023By Amanda R. Champion, David M. Hattie, Devinder Khera, Richard Frank, & Cory L. Pedersen In the aftermath of Alek Minassian’s 2018 van attack in Toronto, Canada, that claimed the lives of 11 individuals, a reporter from The Telegraph stated that Minassian drove a rented van into a crowd of pedestrians on a major downtown ...
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Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover has disrupted the Christchurch Call – NZ needs to rethink its digital strategy
January 4, 2023By Markus Luczak-Roesch, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter as the new sole private owner has delivered plenty of material for memes. Ironically, much of the debate about Twitter is still happening on the platform itself, sometimes with Musk jumping into the conversations personally. At the same time, ...
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Why outsourcing counter-terrorism online won’t work in future
December 21, 2022By David Wells Policing online hate speech currently falls into a murky space shared between governments and big tech. The past five years have seen the creation of a latticework of overlapping methodologies to identify and remove online terrorist content and hate speech. Most notably, a significant proportion of these efforts have effectively been privatised ...
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Disinformation and the 2022 Brazilian General Elections: The First Round Vote
December 14, 2022By Dr James Fitzgerald, Dr R. Marie Santini, and Dr Débora Salles This piece showcases the work of new VOX-Pol member, NetLab[1]. Its purpose is to provide readers with an initial understanding of a coordinated disinformation infrastructure that has flourished in Brazil, with a focus on how it interacted with the first round vote of ...
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VOX-Pol Newsletter 9(4) December 2022
December 13, 2022Welcome to Volume 9, Issue 4 of the VOX-Pol Newsletter. RESEARCHERS: THE REASSURE PROJECT WOULD LIKE TO HEAR FROM YOU! Two years ago, the REASSURE (Researcher Security, Safety and Resilience) project team began documenting the experiences of academic researchers of online extremism and terrorism. Their report on online extremism and terrorism researchers’ security, safety, and resilience ...
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Lessons from the Decline of the American Racist Skinheads and Emerging Online Trends of the Far-Right
December 7, 2022By Jonathan Pieslak In a recent VOX-Pol blog post, I outlined how online digital music contributed to the decline of the American racist skinhead movement. More than the aging-out of members or the recruitment of prospects to other groups, the subculture faced significant challenges brought about by the collapse of physical music media and the ...
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Attentat de Buffalo – Enseignements sur le journal d’un radicalisé d’ultra droite
November 30, 2022This article was originally published in English on GNET, the Global Network on Extremism and Technology. By Laurence Bindner and Raphael Gluck, Le journal de bord de Payton Gendron, auteur de l’attentat de Buffalo le 14 mai 2022 ayant causé la mort de 10 personnes et blessé trois autres, est un document important dans la ...
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Regulating online hate will have unintended, but predictable, consequences
November 23, 2022By Garth Davies, Simon Fraser University and Sarah Negrin, Simon Fraser University The Canadian government is currently holding consultations on a new online hate bill. This bill would update Bill C-36, which addresses hate propaganda, hate crimes and hate speech; the amendment died following the election call last year. Hate propagated on social media and ...
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Academia is Lagging Behind When It Comes to Online Extremism and Terrorism Researcher Welfare
November 16, 2022By Dr Elizabeth Pearson Terrorist propaganda videos, extremist narratives, child sexual exploitation images. These are amongst the materials that content moderators across social media platforms deal with on a daily basis. They’re also materials that academic researchers engage with in order to better understand particular forms of online crime. Over the past decade, the emotional ...