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From the French Revolution, the First Amendment and the Third Reich to Twitter and Facebook: The Impact of Legal Histories on the Fight Against Online Extremism – Part 1: France
February 12, 2020By Nery Ramati The need to develop legal tools in order to cope with the dangers of online extremism and terrorism has been an issue that has kept legislators, government officials, and security forces around the globe very busy in recent years. In liberal democracies, the legal challenges are intensified due to the obvious dangers ...
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Exploring Canadian Far-Right Extremism on Facebook
February 5, 2020By Ryan Scrivens and Amarnath Amarasingam Following the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Canadian right-wing extremist (RWE) groups tried desperately to band together, planning a number of rallies and events in some of the nation’s most urban cities to show support for the extreme right in general and to promote racist, anti-immigration sentiment ...
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“Redirect Method” Yields Valuable Insights for Countering Online Extremism
January 29, 2020In recent years, deadly white supremacist violence at houses of worship in Pittsburgh, Christchurch, and Poway demonstrated the clear line from violent hate speech and radicalization online to in-person violence. With perpetrators of horrific violence taking inspiration from online forums, leveraging the anonymity and connectivity of the internet, and developing sophisticated strategies to spread their ...
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How the Internet has Enabled Pakistani Militants to Explore New Avenues for Foreign Jihad
January 22, 2020By Mehwish Rani Foreign fighters became a subject of the global security debate when many young Europeans, male and female, started travelling to Syria to take part in the conflict there in 2014 and 2015. In Pakistan, the foreign fighter phenomenon has a longer history, having emerged in the 1980s during the Soviet-Afghan War. From ...
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Analyzing Online Posts Could Help Spot Future Mass Shooters and Terrorists
January 15, 2020By Neil Shortland and Allyssa McCabe In the weeks following two mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, police forces across the United States made more than 20 arrests based on threats made on social media. Police in Florida, for example, arrested an alleged white supremacist who, police said, threatened a shooting at a ...
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Empirical Studies of Online Radicalisation: A Review and Discussion
January 8, 2020By Paul Gill Reviews of the terrorism research literature regularly highlight the paucity of original data that inform analyses (Schmid and Jongman 1988; Silke 2001, 2004). In his most recent review of the literature, Silke (2013) noted: “[O]ne feels that a great deal more needs to be done before research is consistently building on past ...
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New VOX-Pol Report: Extreme Digital Speech: Contexts, Responses and Solutions
January 7, 2020VOX-Pol is pleased to present the latest report in the VOX-Pol publication series, titled Extreme Digital Speech: Contexts, Responses and Solutions, edited by Bharath Ganesh and Jonathan Bright. About the Report Extreme digital speech (EDS) is an emerging challenge that requires co-ordination between governments, civil society and the private sector. In this report, a range ...
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Telegram Deplatforming ISIS Has Given Them Something to Fight For
January 1, 2020Deplatforming terrorists from messaging apps may damage existing networks, but those who remain often double down in their beliefs. By Amarnath Amarasingam Earlier this week, a fellow terrorism researcher and friend sent me a text which stated: “TamTam is amazing. I missed all the early ISIS stuff on Telegram. Now I feel like I was ...
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Europol Workshop on Global Right-wing Extremism
December 20, 2019More than 100 participants from national agencies, EU institutions and agencies, and international organisations gathered at Europol’s headquarters in the Hague, Netherlands, on Tuesday, 10 December to take part in a closed workshop on the contemporary dimensions of right-wing extremism and terrorism. The speakers were selected and invited by the ECTC Advisory Network on Terrorism ...
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New VOX-Pol Open Access Chapter
December 19, 2019VOX-Pol is pleased to present a new, open-access chapter in the publication The Human Factor of Cybercrime, edited by Rutger Leukfeldt (Hague University of Applied Sciences) and Thomas J. Holt (Michigan State University). Chapter 13 on ‘The Roles of ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Media Tools and Technologies in the Facilitation of Violent Extremism and Terrorism’, written by ...