Blog

This Blog post is the second—the first is HERE—in a four-part series of article summaries from the EU H2020-funded BRaVE project’s  First Monday Special Issue exploring societal resilience to online polarization and extremism. Read the full article HERE [Ed.].  By James Fitzgerald The rise of QAnon presents researchers with a number of important questions. While emerging literature ...

This Blog post is the first in a four-part series of article summaries from the EU H2020-funded BRaVE project’s  First Monday Special Issue exploring societal resilience to online polarization and extremism. The second is HERE. Read the full article HERE [Ed.]. By Inés Bolaños Somoano This post synopsises my article ‘The right-leaning be memeing: Extremist uses ...

On 2 May 2022, First Monday published a Special Issue exploring societal resilience to online polarisation and extremism, co-edited by Amy-Louise Watkin (VOX-Pol and USW), Vivian Gerrand (Deakin University), and Maura Conway (VOX-Pol and DCU). The seven articles in this special issue were selected from those delivered at a series of workshops undertaken by the ...

By Marco Farucci The events of January 6th showcased the strength of online communities and their ability to transfer extremist ideologies from the online to the offline world. Online extremism usually takes the form of violent, racist, and misogynistic content on social media. The business models of social media platforms are designed with ‘suggesting mechanisms’ ...

By Laura Higson-Bliss The UK government’s much anticipated online safety bill has now been released. The bill seeks to impose a duty of care on companies, such as social media platforms, to remove illegal content, and in some cases, “legal but harmful” content, quickly. Failure to comply will result in heavy fines or, in extreme ...

By Linda Schlegel Over the last two years, the potential nexus between gaming and extremism has received a lot of attention. Researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and international organisations such as the EU and the UN have all declared the topic to be a key area of concern. However, surprisingly little is known about how and why extremists ...

VOX-Pol is please to announce that it has become a member of the RESOLVE Network. The RESOLVE Network is a global consortium of researchers, research organizations, policymakers, and practitioners committed to empirically driven, locally defined research on the drivers of violent extremism and sources of community resilience. VOX-Pol joins as a world-leading centre for the ...

This article summarizes a recent study published in Terrorism and Political Violence. By Ryan Scrivens Although there is an ongoing need for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to identify and assess the online activities of violent extremists prior to their engagement in violence offline, little is empirically known about their online posting patterns generally or ...

In the past few weeks, VOX-Pol’s coordinator, Professor Maura Conway, has featured in two podcasts. In the Combating Jihadist Terror podcast, Prof Conway and Dr Anthony Richards, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Royal Holloway, examine to what extent academics and policymakers should be using the term ‘cyberterrorism’, how to further research into online extremism, as ...

By Annukka Kurki and Veera Tuomala Although they have been around since the first newspapers were printed, fake news, disinformation, misinformation, and conspiracy narratives seem to be more prominent in our everyday lives than ever before. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought on an onslaught of new conspiracies and the spread of dangerous misinformation has been ...