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Blog
Jihadist Activism on the Internet Following the Collapse of the Caliphate
July 24, 2019By Manuel R. Torres-Soriano The collapse of Islamic State’s “caliphate” has had an enormous impact on jihadist activism on the Internet. In a short space of time, we have witnessed a shift from an ecosystem that orbited around the leadership of a strong organisation capable of shouldering the initiative and most of the work needed to ...
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New VOX-Pol Report: Reconciling Impact and Ethics by Dounia Mahlouly
July 23, 2019VOX-Pol has released its latest report in the VOX-Pol publication series, titled Reconciling Impact and Ethics: An Ethnography of Research in Violent Online Political Extremism, authored by Dounia Mahlouly, on 23 July 2019. About the Report Gathering empirical evidence from interviews and focus groups, this study highlights some of the ethical dilemmas face d by the academic ...
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Terrorism and Technology: The Front End
July 17, 2019By Cori E. Dauber and Mark D. Robinson Despite the fact that there is a robust conversation regarding “terrorism and technology,” that discussion uniformly addresses – as near as we can tell – the back end, the dissemination of what terrorists have already produced. We have found virtually nothing in the popular press[1] and nothing in ...
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An Overview of Radical Right-focused Presentations at #TASMConf 2019
July 10, 2019By Pamela Ligouri Bunker and Robert J. Bunker The 2019 Terrorism and Social Media (TASM) Conference took place on 25 and 26 June 2019 at Swansea University Bay Campus, Wales, United Kingdom. The conference was organised by Swansea University’s Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law and its Cyber Threats Research Centre (CYTREC), with the support ...
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ISIS Use of Smaller Platforms and the DWeb to Share Terrorist Content
July 3, 2019Summary of Tech Against Terrorism’s analysis: Analysis of more than 45,000 URLs since 2014 across more than 330 platforms shows that smaller platforms are heavily targeted by ISIS and that 49% of all URLs were found on just eight of these platforms. Key conclusions: ISIS experimentation with small social media platform Koonekti is the most ...
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The Challenge of Drawing a Line between Objectionable Material and Freedom of Expression Online
June 26, 2019By Philippa Smith When it comes to debates about free speech that needs to be protected and hate speech that needs to be legislated, the idiom of “drawing the line” is constantly referenced by politicians, journalists and academics. It has surfaced again as New Zealanders struggle to comprehend the abhorrence of the Christchurch terror attack and ...
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VOX-Pol Sponsors TASM 2019
June 26, 2019VOX-Pol is pleased to co-sponsor the Terrorism and Social Media International Conference, which is taking place at Swansea University on 25 and 26 June 2019. VOX-Pol Research Fellow J.M. Berger gave a keynote address of the first day of the conference. JM is the author of Extremism (MIT Press, 2018), and a 2018 VOX-Pol report The Alt-Right ...
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VOX-Pol at the Society for Terrorism Research 13th International Conference
June 26, 2019VOX-Pol attended the annual Society for Terrorism Research 13th International Conference, which took place at the University of Oslo on 20 and 21 June. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘The data revolution in terrorism research: implications for theory and practice’, and featured two keynotes, two roundtables and twenty-nine panels. VOX-Pol sponsored a roundtable on ...
Blog
How Big Tech Designs its Own Rules of Ethics to Avoid Scrutiny and Accountability
June 20, 2019By David Watts Data ethics is now a cause célèbre. “Digital ethics and privacy” shot into research and advisory company Gartner’s top ten strategic technology trends for 2019. Before that it barely raised a mention. In the past year governments, corporations and policy and technology think tanks have published data ethics guides. An entire cohort ...
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Spoofing, Truthing, and Social Proofing: Digital Influencing after Terrorist Attacks
June 13, 2019By Martin Innes, Helen Innes, and Diyana Dobreva Terrorist attacks are fundamentally designed to ‘terrorise, polarise and mobilise’ different segments of the public. That this is so was tragically underscored by the recent events in New Zealand, where the perpetrator very obviously and self-consciously prepared a messaging campaign to accompany his acts of violence. Recognising these ...