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VOX-Pol has created a dedicated Discord channel as part of the Next Gen Network. This space is specifically geared towards early career researchers with the creation of a supportive community at its forefront. We want to build an environment geared towards the needs of young scholars researching online extremist spaces. Come join the network if ...

By Dr Melissa-Ellen Dowling Note: This blog post is a modified version of the article: Melissa-Ellen Dowling (2024) News to me: far-right news sharing on social media, Information, Communication & Society, 27:1, 39-55. To learn more about this research, please see the original study, available at: DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2023.2166796. How are extremist political ideologies communicated online? What enables political claims to gain traction ...

Welcome to Volume 11, Issue 4 of the monthly VOX-Pol Newsletter. NEW VOX-Pol WEBINAR VOX-Pol is pleased to share a new webinar on YouTube: The Next Gen Academic Survival Workshop Series: Early Career Researcher Safety, Wellbeing and Ethics. This is a new webinar series designed specifically for early career researchers to explore the complexities, challenges, and dangers ...

By Elisa Orofino Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT, literally “the Party of Liberation”) stands as one of the most long-living, transnational Islamist groups inspiring movements and organisations around the world since its inception in 1953 in Palestine. While no official figures on the membership have ever been published, it seems fair to state the HT is currently ...

By Ninian Frenguelli The Seeing Eye to Eye: Developing Sustainable Multistakeholder Communities (SE2E) project was developed and funded through the 2022 Terrorism and Social Media (TASM) Conference sandpit event. The project aim is conducting empirical research into how various stakeholders view and experience multistakeholderism in countering terrorism and violent extremism online (TVE) as part of ...

By Lee Jarvis and Stuart Macdonald The growing number of regulatory regimes aimed at moderating online terrorist and violent extremist content, coupled with more informal processes for law enforcement and other state actors to refer such content to tech companies, have been described as the public-private co-production of security. In this context, it is significant ...

By Joe Whittaker (Swansea University), William Costello (University of Texas at Austin), and Andrew Thomas (Swansea University) Involuntary Celibates (incels) have become a prescient security concern in recent years. This is, in large part, due to the handful of terror attacks conducted by individuals who are part of the online movement, who forge a sense ...

Stuart Macdonald, Swansea University; Ashley A. Mattheis, Dublin City University, and David Wells, Swansea University Every minute, millions of social media posts, photos and videos flood the internet. On average, Facebook users share 694,000 stories, X (formerly Twitter) users post 360,000 posts, Snapchat users send 2.7 million snaps and YouTube users upload more than 500 ...

Welcome to Volume 11, Issue 3 of the monthly VOX-Pol Newsletter. NEW VOX-Pol REPORT VOX-Pol is pleased to publish its newest report, Online Jihadist Propaganda Dissemination Strategies, by Stuart Macdonald and Sean McCafferty. The report is available in full and for free on the VOX-Pol Publications page. The authors discussed the new report on a Tech Against Terrorism Podcast episode last week, titled ‘How ...

By Jonathan Collins This piece examines how far-right online communities on the social media platform Gab Social are built through identity-building narratives. It is also part of a recently published article in Terrorism and Political Violence. Introduction Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are taking steps to counter harmful far-right content and ...