Blog

Welcome to Volume 8, Issue 4 of the VOX-Pol Newsletter. VOX-Pol CONTRIBUTION TO RECENT EVENTS 2021 AVERT RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM The 2021 AVERT Research Symposium took place from 3 to 5 November 2021. This year’s title was ‘Violent Extremism at the Crossroads: Persistence, Change & Dynamism’. The keynotes were given by Prof. Martha Crenshaw, Professor Emerita of Government at Wesleyan University, ...

By Maisie Draper A news story that falsely claimed that the COVID-19 vaccine caused the death of an American doctor was the most viewed article on Facebook in the US for the first three months of 2021. Instead of going public about the platform promoting such misinformation, Facebook held back on publishing the report until The ...

By Anne Speckhard, Maha Ghazi and Molly Ellenberg YouTube, first online in 2005, was one of the earliest social media platforms used by terrorist organizations to spread their propaganda. Although many such groups have used YouTube and other online platforms for malicious purposes, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS] has become notorious over the ...

By Ben Lee Video games and right-wing extremism (RWE) seem inseparable. Multiple links have been documented between extreme-right violence and video-game cultures. These include the appearance of terrorist manifestos with references to video games, modifications to popular games to bring them into line with extreme-right values, the presence of extremists on gaming platforms, and a misogyny-laced controversy in video gaming that did ...

By Jonathan Kenyon As society has embraced the Internet, opportunities for those wanting to use the online space for terrorist purposes have also grown, resulting in the spread of violent extremism and extremist ideologies within communities. Radicalisation is viewed as becoming increasingly covert, causing problems for security and intelligence services tasked with tackling this threat. ...

By Isis Garrigos The VOX-Pol Blog was launched in October 2014 and has since become one of the most visited and shared features of the VOX-Pol website. At the outset, the aim of the Blog was to publish short-form original research directly related to online extremism, online terrorism, online radicalisation, and available responses to these. ...

The VOX-Pol Blog was launched in October 2014 and turned seven years old this month. To celebrate this, VOX-Pol has been tweeting the all-time most-read posts. The all-time top five are: 5. The Far Right Online: An Overview of Recent Studies by Reem Ahmed and Daniela Pisoiu, published 13 Nov 2019 This Blog post is ...

By Suraj Lakhani There has been, especially of late, increasing concern over the misuse of video-games and associated (adjacent) platforms (e.g. Steam, Discord, Twitch, DLive) for the purposes of extremism and violent extremism. Across the European Union (and for that matter globally), policymakers, law enforcement, academics, and counter-extremism practitioners have started to engage more on ...

By Katharine Gelber Hate speech is proliferating online and governments, regulators and social media companies are struggling to keep pace with their efforts to combat it. In July 2021, the racist abuse of Black English football players on Facebook and Twitter has brought the issue to the forefront and shown how slow and ineffective the tech ...

By The SecDev Group The devastating terrorist attack in Kabul by the Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K) and the hasty departure of the US and coalition partners from Afghanistan is generating geopolitical tremors across Central and South Asia and beyond. And while Afghanistan is geographically distant from Bangladesh, the IS-K’s expansive digital footprint and the Taliban’s return to state power after ...