Blog

On 8 December VOX-Pol launched our Online Library, an exciting new research and teaching resource, on its website: www.voxpol.eu. The Library currently has over 250 publications related to various aspects of Violent Online Political Extremism included within it, which makes it the biggest such collection available in one place online today. Users can download all open ...

VOX-Pol Coordinator Dr. Maura Conway (DCU) participated in a panel discussion at the final day of the Internet Leadership Academy in Dublin on 4 December. The Academy was convened by our VOX-Pol partner, the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), together with Google, with the aim of providing an objective overview of all sides of the major policy debates shaping ...

by Andres Guadamuz The announcement that hacktivist collective Anonymous has declared war on the Islamic State has been received positively by the public. After the Paris attack some may think governments are not doing enough to protect civilians, so at least it seems someone is doing something about the terrorist threat. So far the group ...

This is a reminder regarding the final two sessions of VOX-Pol’s Lunch Briefing Series. On Wednesday, 2 December, Dr. Nico Prucha (VOX-Pol Fellow, ICSR) will discuss ‘Online Environments and the Violent Jihad,’ with a particular focus on the content produced and disseminated in the wake of the Paris Attacks. For more details, click HERE. The final Briefing will take place on ...

by Athina Karatzogianni One of the key issues the West has had to face in countering Islamic State (IS) is the jihadi group’s mastery of online propaganda, seen in hundreds of thousands of messages celebrating the atrocities against civilians and spreading the message of radicalisation. It seems clear that efforts to counter IS online are missing ...

Authors Ian Brown and Josh Cowls Abstract This report draws on insights from representatives of civil society, law enforcement and industry groups to offer fresh perspectives on the policing of extremist material online. Evidently, the Internet now serves not only as a breeding ground for extremism, but also offers myriad data streams which potentially hold ...

by Robyn Torok While the average person was getting on with life in Paris before last Friday’s terror bombings and shootings, Twitter threads in Arabic from the Middle East were urging for attacks to be launched upon coalition forces in their home countries. “Advance, advance – forward, forward” they said, regarding Paris. Iraqi forces had ...

Authors Paul Gill, Emily Corner, Amy Thornton, and Maura Conway Abstract Using a unique dataset of 227 convicted UK-based terrorists, this report fills a large gap in the existing literature. Using descriptive statistics, we first outline the degree to which various online activities related to radicalisation were present within the sample. The results illustrate the ...

Welcome to Vol. 2, Iss. 4 of the VOX-Pol Newsletter. VOX-Pol is happy to announce the publication of its first research report earlier this month, which measures online behaviours of convicted UK terrorists. We will release another report on 23 November examining the political, legal, and ethical constraints of policing the Internet for violent extremist content. If ...

by Elizabeth Pearson In the past two years, the so-called Islamic State (IS) has made Twitter its own, many of its supporters even describing the social media forum as an IS ‘wilayat’ or ‘province’. As academics and policy-makers alike become increasingly aware of the role of the online environment in radicalisation, the use of Twitter ...