Blog

Welcome to Vol. 5 Iss. 1 of the VOX-Pol Newsletter. This is VOX-Pol’s fifth year in operation; thanks for supporting us over the last four years. If you have colleagues or friends who may be interested in the content of our newsletter, or any events or research carried out by VOX-Pol, please forward this to ...

By Ryan Scrivens and Garth Davies Violent extremists and those who subscribe to radical beliefs have left their digital footprints online since the inception of the World Wide Web. Notable examples include Anders Breivik, the Norwegian far-right terrorist convicted of killing 77 people in 2011, who was a registered member of a white supremacy web forum and had ties ...

We have published a number of recent Blog posts–see HERE, HERE, and HERE–that address issues around content regulation and intermediary liability. We therefore thought the below would be a timely intervention. The piece is excerpted from Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society’s Law, Borders, and Speech Conference Proceedings Volume, where it appears as an appendix. ...

On 7-8 February, VOX-Pol Programme Manager, Lisa McInerney, participated in the EU’s  Radicalisation Awareness Network’s (RAN) Communication and Narratives Working Group latest meeting in Vienna, Austria. The meeting is focused on how research and evidence-based psychological and neuroscientific insights can be translated into practical information and tools to help practitioners develop more effective alternative and counter-narrative ...

Content removal on social media platforms often takes place through semi-automated or automated processes. Algorithms are widely used for content filtering and content removal processes1, including on social media platforms, directly impacting freedom of expression and raising rule of law concerns (e.g. questions of legality, legitimacy and proportionality). While large social media platforms like Google or Facebook have ...

Attempts to rein in the internet industry in democratic countries will show who really is in charge. by Judy Dempsey Reposted with permission from Carnegie Europe On January 1, a new German law aimed at reining in social media came into force. Called the Network Enforcement Act, or “NetzDG”, social media companies from Facebook and Twitter, to YouTube, Instagram, ...

By Matteo Vergani and Ana-Maria Bliuc. Are the psychological factors driving ISIS’s mobilisation in Western countries different from those characteristic of other jihadist groups like al-Qaeda? Does the target audience of ISIS’s English-language online propaganda differ from that of al-Qaeda? If so, then how? In our new journal article, we examine these questions by analysing the ...

This is an abridged version of a presentation delivered by David Wells at the World Counter Terror Congress in London on 4 May 2017. Intro Since leaving the intelligence world in late 2014, I’ve researched and written about counter-terrorism. My primary focus has been a controversial and misunderstood area of modern day intelligence practice – ...

By Brad Galloway and Ryan Scrivens 2017 saw an increase in the on- and offline activities of organised hate groups in various parts of the Western world, including – but, indeed, not limited to – the US, Canada, and the UK. Some have attributed this spike to the current political climate in the West, from ...

In December 2016, National Action became the first extreme right-wing group to be proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK. This, however, did not stop them from continuing their operations under new names, e.g. ‘Scottish Dawn’ and ‘NS131’, both of which were more recently banned by the Home Office. In a previous blog post, ...