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Blog
Examining Online Behaviours: Violent and Non-Violent Right-Wing Extremists During Peak Posting Days
June 19, 2024By Ryan Scrivens For more on these findings and the nature of the study in general, see the full manuscript which was recently published open access in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. Despite the ongoing need for practitioners to identify violent right-wing extremists (RWEs) online before their engagement in violence offline, there is little empirical knowledge about their digital footprints in general ...
Blog
Unmasking the Dark Side of Humour: Far-Right Strategic Mainstreaming in Memes
June 12, 2024By Ursula Schmid, Heidi Schulze and Antonia Drexel Memes are an important part of social media communication, frequently associated with contemporary (pop)culture. Even though most people use memes for benign purposes, beneath the surface of seemingly innocent jokes lies a darker underbelly: there has been a substantial debate regarding the use of memes to spread ...
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VOX-Pol Newsletter 11(6) June 2024
June 11, 2024Welcome to Volume 11, Issue 6 of the monthly VOX-Pol Newsletter. VOX-Pol AT TASM The Terrorism and Social Media (TASM) conference takes place in the Great Hall on Swansea University’s Bay Campus on 18 and 19 June 2024. VOX-Pol is a co-organiser of the conference, please visit our stand and say hello! UPCOMING VOX-Pol WORKSHOP A ...
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Male-supremacy as a violent political ideology
June 5, 2024By Shannon Zimmerman Last Saturday, a man armed with a large knife entered the Westfield shopping centre at Bondi Junction in Sydney. He proceeded to attack over a dozen people before being killed by a policewoman. Video footage appears to show the attacker avoiding men and targeting women. Five of the six people killed in ...
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VOX-Pol Member Maura Conway at the EU versus Crime Conference
May 31, 2024VOX-Pol Member Professor Maura Conway presented at the ‘EU versus Crime‘ conference co-organised by Europol and the European Commission. This event kicked off of Europol’s 25th anniversary year. The festivities kicked off on 28 May at the EU versus Crime conference, co-organised by Europol and the European Commission. Europol’s Executive Director Catherine De Bolle and the ...
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Seeing Eye to Eye: Recognising the ‘Public’ as a Stakeholder in Multistakeholder Initiatives
May 29, 2024By Connor Rees The Seeing Eye to Eye: Developing Sustainable Multistakeholder Communities (SE2E) project was developed and funded through the 2022 Terrorism and Social Media (TASM) Conference sandpit event. The project aim is conducting empirical research into how various stakeholders view and experience multistakeholderism in countering terrorism and violent extremism online (TVE) as part of the larger ...
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Two Harms of Hate Speech and the Limits of Counter-Speech
May 22, 2024By Sam Jackson For more than a decade, we’ve been debating how to respond to hate speech – broadly understood as “offensive discourse targeting a group or an individual based on inherent characteristics (such as race, religion or gender).”1 The status quo in the United States holds that governments may not restrict speech outside of narrow exceptions (for ...
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‘News overload’: how a constant stream of violent images affects your brain
May 15, 2024By Francisco Javier Saavedra Macías, Universidad de Sevilla In May 1097, during the siege of Nicaea, crusaders catapulted the severed heads of prisoners over the walls surrounding the city, with the aim of terrorising their enemy. The strategy worked. On June 19 of the year the crusaders captured the city. However, only those who lived ...
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VOX-Pol Newsletter 11(5) May 2024
May 14, 2024Welcome to Volume 11, Issue 5 of the monthly VOX-Pol Newsletter. NEW VOX-Pol REPORT VOX-Pol is pleased to publish a new report AI Extremism: Technologies, Tactics, Actors. This report is written by Stephane Baele, Professor of International Relations at UCLouvain, and Lewys Brace, Senior Lecturer in Computational Social Science (Criminology) at Exeter University. The report was published on 25 April and was ...
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The Potential of Short Form Videos as P/CVE Messages
May 8, 2024By Joe Whittaker, Farangiz Atamuradova, Kamil Yilmaz, Simon Copeland, Lilah El Sayed, Jon Deedman Short form video has, put simply, become one of the most popular social media formats on the Internet. By “short form” we mean videos of around 30-90 seconds; each platform that utilises it has their own specifications about the minimum and ...