Blog

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 ...

By Raheel Nawaz The UK government – with considerable pomp and ceremony – recently unveiled a new online tool for detection and removal of jihadi videos boasting a high success rate. It has been claimed by the Home Office that the machine learning tool, which the government developed with ASI Data Science, can identify 94% ...

By Kiriloi M. Ingram Since the self-proclaimed Caliphate’s inception, debate amongst scholars has ensued over whether the Islamic State’s (IS’s) muhajirat (female émigrés) would become female combatants. For example, Nelly Lahoud argues that IS is unlikely to devise a policy explicitly allowing women to engage in combat, as legitimating such a role would allow women to ...

By Adam G. Klein As the National Rifle Association, the most influential gun rights advocacy group in the U.S., comes under pressure from victims’ groups and gun control advocates, internet companies like Amazon, Apple and YouTube are finding themselves uncomfortably close to the center of the controversy. These are among the companies that currently stream the ...

On 9 March, 2018 VOX-Pol Coordinator Prof. Maura Conway presented a keynote on the issue of ‘Online Radicalisation: Then and Now’ at London Grid for Learning’s (LGfL) inaugural safeguarding conference. In her keynote, Maura outlined the significant changes observed in extremist recruitment, including that of so-called ‘Islamic State’ and the extreme right, over the past number of ...

On 7 March, 2018 VOX-Pol Coordinator Prof. Maura Conway gave evidence to the UK House of Lords International Relations Committee.  The meeting was hosted by the Chairman of the Select Committee Lord Howell of Guildford in the Palace of Westminster.  The purpose of the meeting was to gather opinions on the changes wrought by digital technologies in the international system, particularly the role of the Internet and its ...

This is the second in a two-part series; part one is HERE. By Anne Speckhard & Ardian Shajkovci Last week’s Blog post described ICVSE’s efforts directing counter narratives into the ISIS-dominated Internet space. This post discusses the ethics of attempting such interventions. As in all our work, our research ethics for Internet interventions with ISIS ...

This is part one of a two-part series; the second part is HERE. By Anne Speckhard, Ardian Shajkovci, Lorand Bodo & Haris Fazliu It is estimated that of the 38,000 foreign fighters who have joined Sunni militant groups, such as ISIS and al-Nusra, in Iraq and Syria, upwards of 875 have originated from the Balkans, ...

By Maura Conway and Michael Courtney Jihadi magazines have a long pedigree, are the subject of extensive media coverage and scholarly analysis,[1] and are still easily accessible online. In a recent book chapter, ‘Online Jihadi Instructional Content: The Role of Magazines,’ Conway, Parker, and Looney,  focused on the instructional content, both text and images, published in ...

VOX-Pol released its Violent Extremism and Terrorism Online in 2017: The Year in Review today, 20 February 2018. This is the second publication in the Year in Review series following the Year in Review 2016. The report treats developments in the violent extremist and terrorist online scene(s) and responses to them in the 12 month period ...