Blog

Welcome to Vol. 3, Iss. 1 of the VOX-Pol Newsletter. VOX-Pol is now at the beginning of its third year, and we are looking forward to an exciting year ahead, full of events and publications. If you have colleagues or friends who may be interested in the content of this newsletter or any events and ...

by Wasim Ahmed In one of my previous blog posts I outlined a number of software applications that could be used to capture and analyse data from Twitter. In this blog post I outline some of the methodological, ethical, privacy, and copyright issues associated with using Twitter as a data source. Twitter can be used as a ...

by David Mair On Thursday 21st January 2015, al-Shabaab attacked the Lido Beach area of Mogadishu in the heart of Somalia.  The area is regarded as Somalia’s premier tourism destination; where Somalis can relax on white sands and enjoy the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.  Despite being on the Foreign Office no-go list, Lido ...

by Joel Wing In the west, the Islamic State (IS) is usually described as a new type of insurgent group that is exploiting technological advances to spread its message to create a new global brand of jihad that has attracted followers from around the world. Haroro Ingram, a Research Fellow at the Coral Bell School ...

VOX-Pol’s 2015 – 2016 Research Fellow is Dr. Matti Pohjonen. Matti joined VOX-Pol partner the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy (IFSH) at the University of Hamburg at the start of November 2015. Matti’s research focuses on different kinds of conflict mediation mechanisms through which social media communities across the world have tried to counter ...

by Andi Rahman Alamsyah People were commenting on social media within moments of the terrorist bombings and shooting on 14 January in Jakarta by attackers linked to Islamic State (IS). Two popular hashtags emerged on Twitter and Facebook: #PrayForJakarta and #KamiTidakTakut, which translates as “We are not afraid”. The Pray-for-something hashtag is a common phrase on ...

by Esther Kersley Last week the new UN privacy chief said UK surveillance was “worse than [George Orwell’s novel] 1984”. In the two years since the Snowden leaks revealed the existence of bulk internet and phone surveillance by US intelligence services and their partners, including the UK, the British government continues to engage in the ...

by Pete Brown “And so it begins … ISIS flag among refugees in Germany fighting the police,” blared the headline on the Conservative Post; “with this new leaked picture, everything seems confirmed”. The image in question purported to show a group of Syrian refugees holding ISIS flags and attacking German police officers. For those resistant ...

by David Donaldson The Australian Defence Force’s latest initiative in the war on the Islamic State, a Twitter account disputing “Daesh lies”, builds on lessons from the problems encountered by earlier attempts at countering IS propaganda — but nobody really knows if it will work. The @fight_DAESH account, which became the object of unwanted attention when ...

by Thomas Hegghammer I have studied jihadism online for nearly 15 years, and I have never seen jihadis exploit the Internet with greater ease, effectiveness and impunity than they do today. The past five years have seen a veritable collapse in the policing of extremist activity online, and I believe this has contributed significantly to ...