Blog

by Andrew Murray Last week reports emerged in the media that the proposed Investigatory Powers Bill may lead to the banning of popular communications apps Snapchat, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. This was in many ways not news as the same reports had appeared in January but with the Home Secretary announcing that the Bill would be published in the ...

VOX-Pol’s Dr. Kate Coyer, also Director of the Center for Media and Communication Studies at Central European University (CEU), Budapest, Hungary participated in the “Media Freedom and Responsibilities in the Context of Counter-Terrorism Policies” workshop organised by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Bucharest, Romania from 7- 8 October 2015. The workshop focussed ...

By Irene McGinn and Adam Joinson This blog post explores the reasons why some online ideological groups take action while others do not and focuses on to what extent the online communications of ideological groups contribute to direct collective action. In order to address this question, we examined a number of online groups using a variety of ...

VOX-Pol’s inaugural week-long Training Academy took place in Valencia, Spain from Monday, 21 September, 2015 to Friday, 25 September, 2015. The event was designed to provide policymakers, law enforcement, social media companies, and others professionally tasked with responding to violent online extremism and terrorism with an introduction to the role of the Internet in contemporary ...

VOX-Pol Programme Manager and Research Fellow, Lisa McInerney, participated in CYBERSEC, the European Cybersecurity Forum which was held from 28-29 September in Krakow, Poland. In one of the military breakout sessions on ‘Cyberthreats: New Dimensions of Conflicts in Europe, Lisa’s contribution focused upon ‘Islamic State’ online capabilities and operations. ...

VOX-Pol Research Fellow Dr. Nico Prucha is quoted extensively in a piece entitled ‘Fighting ISIS Online’ published yesterday (30 Sept. 2015) by MIT Technology Review. The article’s author, David Talbot, describes how the Islamic State (IS) has mastered the use of online propaganda and recruitment via the internet. Dr. Prucha explains in the piece how ...

by Massimo Leone On the one hand, terrorism is the antithesis of communication. It does not aim at transmitting any message to its victims, but at annihilating them. On the other hand, yet, terrorism is extremely powerful communication for those who witness the tragedy, directly or through the media, and are either terrified or fascinated ...

VOX-Pol’s Dr. Maura Conway delivered a keynote address at last week’s FOSINT Conference (26 – 27 August 2015), which was co-located with ASONAM 2015 at Telecom-ParisTech in Paris, France. FOSINT, which stands for ‘International Symposium on Foundations of Open Source Intelligence and Security Informatics,’ is focused on web intelligence and security, crime data mining, cybercrime analysis, open source situational ...

VOX-Pol Research Fellow Dr. Nico Prucha presented a talk on “Online Media and Online Extremism: The Case of Sunni Extremists and Media Strategies” for a workshop entitled “Violent Extremism in the Western Balkans” that took place in Belgrade, Serbia from 27 – 29 September. The event was organized by the Partnership for Peace (PfP) Consortium ...

by Andrea Cerase, Elena D’Angelo and Claudia Santoro The rise of racism in Europe In recent years online racism has seen a quick and serious growth in many European and non-European countries, till to become a worrying global phenomenon.(1) One of the most striking examples of such process is the rise of White Supremacist Movements online. Their strategy ...