Blog

By Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández and Joanne Gray People watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Over the past few years, the video sharing platform has come under fire for its role in spreading and amplifyingextreme views. YouTube’s video recommendation system, in particular, has been criticised for radicalising young people and steering viewers ...

In cooperation with French media Le Monde (in English here), the EU DisinfoLab helped expose a French white supremacist network that uses deceptive Facebook pages to attract visitors on their website to generate revenue from online advertisements, and sell racist products as a means to support their activities. Key takeaways from our study We uncovered ...

By Colin Klein, Adam Dunn, Peter Clutton Why do people believe conspiracy theories? Is it because of who they are, what they’ve encountered, or a combination of both? The answer is important. Belief in conspiracy theories helps fuel climate change denial, anti-vaccination stances, racism, and distrust of the media and science. In a paper published ...

By Prof. Maura Conway My 2016 paper ‘Determining the Role of the Internet in Violent Extremism and Terrorism,’ put forward six suggestions for progressing research in our field. These suggestions, briefly, related to (1) widening the range of types of violent online extremism being studied beyond violent jihadis; (2) engaging in more comparative research, not ...

Students in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast hosted a conference dedicated to ‘New Perspectives on Non-state Political Violence’ on Friday, 22 and Saturday, 23 November 2019. PhD and early-career researchers, as well as experienced academics, from a range of backgrounds, contributed presentations. VOX-Pol’s Coordinator, Prof. Maura Conway (Dublin ...

Welcome to Volume 6 Issue 4 of the VOX-Pol Newsletter. If you have colleagues or friends who may be interested in the content of our newsletter, or any events or research carried out by VOX-Pol, please forward this to them and encourage them to subscribe via our website. Follow us on Twitter @VOX_Pol for live updates ...

By Shahed Warreth Introduction While extremist groups are well financed, little research has been carried out on how they the internet to use crowdfunding and cryptocurrencies. To date, research into their online activities has focused predominantly on their propaganda and recruiting on social media. However, there have been several instances in which the far right ...

By Reem Ahmed and Daniela Pisoiu Social media is attractive to the far right in the same way as it is to other extremist groups. It offers a more direct, personal communication channel with potential audiences (Ernst et al. 2017: 1357). Moreover, in the absence of traditional media ‘gatekeepers’, the far right are able to ...

VOX-Pol attended the 2019 Security Research Event (SRE), which took place in Helsinki on the 6-7 November. The event was co-organised by the European Commission and the Finnish Ministry of the Interior as a side event of Finland’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union. The theme of this year’s SRE was ‘Building Bridges: Towards Increased ...

VOX-Pol is pleased to present a new report in the VOX-Pol publication series, titled How Extreme is the European Far-Right? Investigating Overlaps in the German Far-Right Scene on Twitter by Reem Ahmed and Daniela Pisoiu. The launch – in print and online – takes place at the final Lunch Briefing session on 12 November 2019 ...