Blog

by Arie Perliger One of the most favorable habits of scholars of terrorism is self-reflection on their field. Numerous op-eds and articles are published every year, striving to reflect on the development and challenges in terrorism studies and assess which future topics will be the most promising and policy-relevant. Such summaries, however, usually expose some ...

by Ye Bin Won and Meghan Conroy In 2014, the Post reported on a study that found that almost 60% of Americans surveyed admitted that they did not watch, read, or hear any news stories beyond the headlines in the previous week. A few years later, the Post reported on another study that found that ...

By Andrew Whiting   First announced in January 2019, last week saw the publication of the long-awaited independent review of Prevent led by Lord Shawcross. Prevent is controversial and this review has had its own controversies.  The review’s original lead was replaced after legal challenge and the subsequent appointment of Shawcross led to a boycott ...

by Greta Jasser Incel forums are online spaces with little to no moderation against violent and harmful speech. Yet, despite the almost non-existent community guidelines, users aim to debate, break or circumvent them, as transgression and violent talk are central to the community that formed in these spaces. The term incel is a shorthand for ‘involuntarily ...

By Sean McCafferty This analysis will focus on the role of file-sharing platforms in disseminating propaganda linked to violent far-right lone-actor attacks, examining the recent Bratislava perpetrator as a case study. A pattern among a selection of attackers represents an emerging typology of behaviour within the propaganda dissemination strategies of violent extremists on the far ...

Book Review by Andrew Glazzard Terrorism is, as we know, propaganda in word and deed. Terrorists communicate symbolically (through their choice of targets, or their methods of attack) as well as directly through statements, stories and appeals. There is, therefore, no shortage of studies  addressing how terrorists exploit mass media, from the made-for-television spectaculars of ...

By 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 ...

By 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 ...

By 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, ...

By 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 ...