Blog

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, ...

By Haroro J. Ingram & Alastair Reed In Part I of this series, the authors presented the key findings of the CTSC Project’s latest publication titled “Islamic State’s English-language Magazines, 2014-17: Trends & Implications for CT-CVE Strategic Communications”. It began by highlighting the limitations inherent to studies of ISIS’s English language messaging before identifying the first ...

By Haroro J. Ingram & Alastair Reed The challenges associated with confronting militant Islamist propaganda have not waned with the territorial demise of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS). Sure, ISIS’s propaganda output is down overall from the peaks of 2015 and this downward trend has provided the backdrop for periods of particularly sharp declines in mid-2016 and late-2017. ...

On 4-7 April, VOX-Pol researchers participated in the International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Convention, in San Francisco, California. The ISA is one of the oldest interdisciplinary associations dedicated to understanding international, transnational and global affairs, with more than seven thousand members worldwide. Whilst topics covered at the conference are wide-ranging, there are always a large number of panels ...

By Emma Llansó In early March the European Commission released its “Recommendation on measures to effectively tackle illegal content online”, which presents the Commission’s ideas for how to speed up removal of allegedly illegal content. (CDT’s full analysis of the Recommendation is here.) The Recommendation includes a number of departures from the traditional court-order process, which ...