Blog

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

By Timothy Holman “I think it’s — there are several networks. There are several facilitators. There are plenty of ways to get information back and forth: go through mosques, go through the Internet, go through phones, and you go through former regime elements that are located in Syria and other countries. There is a vast ...