Blog

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 ...

By 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 ...

Welcome 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 ...

By 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 ...

This 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 ...

By 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 ...

By 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 ...

Book Review by Seán Looney “Put starkly: Facebook livestreamed this massacre. While the terrorist was cast as a ‘lone gunman’ he was anything but alone.” The introduction to Editors Shirley Leitch and Paul Pickering’s book lays out the global impact of the Christchurch Attack succinctly. The book could be more accurately described as ‘Rethinking Social ...

This article summarizes a panel from the Terrorism and Social Media Conference 2022 hosted by Swansea University. By Mr Jade Hutchinson State of play Networks of organisms and their relationship with different environments are difficult to theorize. Natural sciences are abundant in terms and concepts to articulate the emergent complexity of evolving networks, their processes ...

By Daniel Siegel and Mary Bennett Doty U.S. troop withdrawal & Taliban mobilizations In 2011, despite concerns about the Afghan government’s capacity to secure its territory, President Obama set a timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops. Subsequently, the Trump and Biden administrations backed further efforts to reduce troops in Afghanistan. While military experts ...