Blog

By Alice E. Marwick This post is part I of the series. Please click here to read part II. In November 2016, Twitter shut down the accounts of numerous alt-right leaders and white nationalists. Richard Spencer, the head of the National Policy Institute and a vocal neo-Nazi, told the LA Times it was a violation of his free ...

By Sean Lawson In a pair of recent essays, Timothy Edgar, the academic director of law and policy at Brown University‘s Executive Master in Cybersecurity program, has outlined the legal basis for how a President Donald Trump could potentially shut down the U.S. internet in response to a national security crisis. Edger’s concerns stem from Trump’s statements on the campaign ...

Dr. Caterina Froio joined the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) in December 2016 as a VOX-Pol Research Fellow. In December 2015, she was awarded a research grant from the City Hall of Paris for a research project dealing with far right ‘othering’ discourses online in France. She is currently expanding on this work within the broader ...

By Ali Fisher Challenging ISIS has little to do with their number of followers, or the decline in their number of messages. This type of tactical-level data can indicate success, but genuine impact can only occur with robust interpretation of data at the strategic level. Recent studies have been used to claim success in reducing the number of followers ...

By Mark Graham What do Google, Uber, and Facebook have in common? You might think that the answer is that they are all technology companies. But actually it is that they all pretend to be technology companies. This shared lie amongst platform companies is both bad for workers and bad for users of those platforms. ...

By Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan White nationalism, which advocates against multiculturalism in favour of an ethnic and cultural state linked to a mythologised European identity, has become an increasingly high profile movement over the past five years. Anders Breivik in Norway, Dylan Roof in America, and (to a lesser degree) Thomas Mair in the United Kingdom all had ...

By Emma Llansó On 5 December, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube announced their intent to begin collaborating on the removal of terrorist propaganda across their services. Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) is deeply concerned that this joint project will create a precedent for cross-site censorship and will become a target for governments and private actors seeking to ...

By Tobias Gemmerli This article was originally published by the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) on 10 November 2016. Our democratic culture can act as a safeguard against radicalisation, if we make space in the public debate for counter-cultural movements and radical political projects. In the confrontation with radicalism and political violence, democratic freedoms are often named the ...

On 8 December, VOX-Pol’s Programme Manager, Lisa McInerney, presented a selection of VOX-Pol research at the second meeting of the EU Internet Forum in Brussels. The meeting was convened by Mr. Dimitris Avramopoulos, EU Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship, and Mr. Julian King, Commissioner for the Security Union. Contributors included, in addition to ...

By Amarnath Amarasingam The Syrian war has been, for good and often for ill, an incubator for developing new tools and strategies for digital conflict. Whether any of these actors “win” the Syrian war, their digital strategies will likely be with us for a long time. ISIS and other jihadist groups have inspired tens of ...