Blog

We’re delighted to welcome J.M. Berger on board as a VOX-Pol Research Fellow. We’re also very pleased to announce that J.M. will launch his new book, Extremism (MIT Press), at a reception during our VOX-Pol conference in Amsterdam  on 22 – 21 August, 2018.  J.M.’s prior publications include, with Jonathon Morgan, The ISIS Twitter Census (2015), with Jessica Stern, ISIS: ...

By Alexander Ritzmann The Propaganda Process Is online propaganda really effective? How can it be countered? And what can practitioners of Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) and policymakers learn from the research findings of other relevant disciplines, such as anthropology, psychology and neuroscience? Propaganda, understood here as the strategic communication of ideas aiming at manipulating specific target ...

By Gabe Maldoff The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into effect in the spring of 2018, replacing the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC and imposing new obligations on organizations that process the personal data of European Union residents. While the Regulation aims to bolster privacy rights, it arrives as a centerpiece of the EU Digital ...

By Andre Oboler Online bullying, hate and incitement are on the rise, and new approaches are needed to tackle them. As the Australian Senate conducts hearings for its Inquiry into cyberbullying, it should consider a two-pronged approach to combating the problem. First, the government should follow the lead of Germany in imposing financial penalties on major ...

Welcome to Vol. 5 Iss. 2 of the VOX-Pol Newsletter. This is VOX-Pol’s fifth year in operation; thank you for your continued support over the last four years. If you have colleagues, friends or anyone who may be interested in the content of our newsletter, or any events or research carried out by VOX-Pol, please ...

By Tiana Gaudette, Ryan Scrivens, and Garth Davies Since the advent of the Internet, far-right extremists – amongst other extremist movements – from across the globe have exploited online resources to build a transnational ‘virtual community’. The Internet is a fundamental medium that facilitates these radical communities, not only in ‘traditional’ hate sites such as Stormfront, ...

By Marco Bastos and Shawn T. Walker Facebook recently announced dramatic data access restrictions on its app and website. The company framed the lockdown as an attempt to protect user information, in response to the public outcry following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But the decision is in line with growing restrictions imposed on researchers studying ...

By Shelley Hepworth A group of 20 academics based at universities around the world have written an open letter to Facebook, calling on the company to rethink how it engages with the research community. In the wake of recent controversies over privacy, Facebook recently announced restrictions to third-party access to public user data via its Application ...

We’re at Swansea University this week for a joint workshop with The Cyberterrorism Project on ‘The Ethics of Internet-mediated Terrorism Research,’ so we thought we’d post a Blog on ethics-related issues. [Ed.] By Natasha Whiteman When the Facebook data of 50m users was collected by Cambridge academic Aleksandr Kogan, his actions reportedly came to the ...

The second conference of Europol’s European Counter Terrorism Centre (ECTC) Advisory Group took place at their headquarter’s in The Hague on 17 – 18 April. VOX-Pol Coordinator Prof. Maura Conway presented new research on ‘The Jihadi Online Ecology (Beyond ISIS)’ at the conference, which attracted more than 100 participants from a diverse range of backgrounds, ...