Blog

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 ...

Welcome to Volume 6 Issue 2 of the VOX-Pol Newsletter. If you have colleagues or friends who may be interested in the content of our newsletter, or in any VOX-Pol events and research, please forward this to them and encourage them to subscribe via our website. Follow us on Twitter @VOX_Pol for live updates and releases. Yours Sincerely, The ...

This Blog post is a lightly edited version of a report prepared by the EU Internet Referral Unit in Europol and circulated to law enforcement agencies and member states in October 2018. It is appearing here publicly for the first time, at the request of Europol. [Ed.] Key Takeaways Non-violent material is integral to terrorists’ propaganda ...

Yesterday, 6 May 2019, the European Commission hosted a senior officials’ meeting in Brussels, to which VOX-Pol contributed. Our Coordinator, Prof. Maura Conway (Dublin City University), focused in her remarks on findings from research, funded by EU Directorate-General Justice, forthcoming on the European extreme right’s #Twitter activity and changes to it between 2016 and 2018. Prof. Conway ...

By Stuart M Bender The shocking mass-shooting in Christchurch on 15 March was notable for using livestreaming video technology to broadcast horrific first-person footage of the shooting on social media. The perpetrator of this week’s attack on a California synagogue also allegedly planned to livestream the latter, except this did not materialise The use of social media technology ...

By Ross Frenett Introduction The murder of Lyra McKee on Good Friday has shone a spotlight on an often under-reported and under-analysed form of violent extremism, violent dissident republicanism (VDR).  McKee’s murder was not an aberration; in the past number of years, VDR groups have killed two soldiers, two Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) ...

Building upon the Melbourne (2016) and Bangkok (2017) conferences, the third edition of the Addressing the New Landscape of Terrorism international conference series took place from 22 – 24 April 2019 in Rabat, Morocco. VOX-Pol Academic Advisory Board member Dr. Brigitte Nacos (Columbia University) delivered a keynote presentation at the event. Her address provided a historical overview of the ...