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Summary 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 ...

By 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 ...

VOX-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 ...

VOX-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 ...

By 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 ...

By 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 ...

By Manuel R. Torres Soriano The European Commission intends to adopt a new regulation aimed at strengthening the fight against terrorist content on the Internet. The main innovation is a catalogue of very specific obligations for companies providing services, imposed with the threat of heavy penalties. With this move, the EU is abandoning its previous ...

By Mike Caulfield Sam prides himself on questioning conventional wisdom and subjecting claims to intellectual scrutiny. For kids today, that means Googling stuff. One might think these searches would turn up a variety of perspectives, including at least a few compelling counterarguments. One would be wrong. The Google searches flooded his developing brain with endless ...

By Laurence Bindner This post was originally published on our Blog in French in January 2019. It was cross-posted with permission from Ultima Ratio, IFRI’s security and defence Blog. This is its first time appearing in English. [Ed.] The appeal trial of the administrators of the Ansar al-Haqq forum got under way at the Paris Regional ...

New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern and French President Macron are co-hosting a meeting in Paris today to discuss a New Zealand-spearheaded plan, named the “Christchurch Call,” to eliminate violent extremist and terrorist content from the Internet. The below post summarises the tech sector’s response(s) to the exploitation of their services by the Christchurch terrorist’s sympathisers ...