Blog
Here’s How Radical Groups Like Islamic State Use Social Media to Attract Recruits
June 15, 2016
By Sandy Schumann Following the deaths of several African American men at the hands of police last year, the Twitter hashtag #blacklivesmatter enabled people from around the world to discuss race relations in the US. What is less well-known is that this hashtag – among others – was also used by supporters of Islamic State, who aimed to appeal ...
News
VOX-Pol Semantic Multimedia Analysis Workshop for Researching Violent Online Political Extremism Content at SRIE2016
June 13, 2016
A workshop based on the semantic multimedia analysis for researching violent online political extremism content was held under the auspices of VOX-Pol at SRIE2016 (Security Research & Innovation Event), which took place in The Hague, The Netherlands, on June 1 and 2. SRIE is an annual event where industry, governments and knowledge institutions come together ...
Blog
European Commission Online Platform Proposals Puts Onus on Companies
June 8, 2016
By Jens-Henrik Jeppesen On 25 May, the European Commission published a set of proposals and documents under the umbrella of its Digital Single Market strategy. Among them is a Communication on ‘Online Platforms and the Digital Single Market Opportunities and Challenges for Europe’. This sets out the Commission’s conclusions and proposed actions based on its Platforms Consultation, which ...
Blog
Information Warfare: Weaponizing Facebook And Twitter
June 1, 2016
U.S. SOCOM (Special Operations Command) has increasingly depended on commercial technology to gain an edge in battle. This has paid off as Islamic terrorists have moved some of the combat to the Internet, which they use for recruiting, fund raising, training and carrying out attacks or for defense. SOCOM is now turning to commercial Internet ...
Blog
My Islamic State Social Network
May 25, 2016
My first conversation with Islamic State was about my reporting. I had just shared an article I’d written about the terrorist group recruiting Western fighters on my Twitter when I saw that someone using the Twitter handle Abu Omar had also posted a link to the piece on his own account. His profile photo unabashedly ...
Blog
America is ‘Dropping Cyberbombs’ – but How Do They Work?
May 18, 2016
By Richard Forno & Anupam Joshi Recently, United States Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work publicly confirmed that the Pentagon’s Cyber Command was “dropping cyberbombs,” taking its ongoing battle against the Islamic State group into the online world. Other American officials, including President Barack Obama, have discussed offensive cyber activities, too. The American public has only glimpsed ...
Newsletter
VOX-Pol Newsletter 3(2) May 2016
May 12, 2016
Welcome to Vol. 3, Iss. 2 of the VOX-Pol Newsletter. We hope to see many of you at our 22 – 24 June 2016 conference in Dublin. The draft lineup is now online HERE. Register HERE to attend. If you have colleagues or friends who may be interested in the content of this newsletter or any events and ...
Events
VOX-Pol Mid-Project Conference: Draft Programme
May 12, 2016
Full Programme and Schedule   Hot Contemporary Topics: Youth, ‘Lonewolves,’ OSINT #emotion – Youth, Social Media and ISIS Debra Smith: Victoria University Online Violent and Non-violent Radicalisation of Afghan Youth Weeda Mehran: York University The Rise of Open Source Jihad – Autodidactic Lone Wolves or Bumbling Ideological Illiterates Akil Awan: Royal Holloway, University of London ...
Blog
Countering Lone Wolf Terrorism: Weak Signals and Online Activities
May 11, 2016
By Lisa Kaati and Fredrik Johansson Lone wolf terrorists can come in a variety of shapes and backgrounds and they are in general very hard to detect before they attack. As argued by previous research, there are no clear profiles for lone wolf terrorists since they have a large variation in factors such as social status, ...
Blog
How Jabhat Al Nusra Uses Twitter to Spread Propaganda
May 4, 2016
Twitter has become a key social media platform used by non-state actors in Syria to send propaganda to the rest of the world. For the most part Twitter has done a good job of clamping down on ISIS presence on the website. Twitter routinely bans ISIS supporter’s accounts and is quite fast at deleting ISIS propaganda ...