Blog

by Anna Orosz The Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary hosted the third VOX-Pol workshop on 5 – 6 March with the participation of nearly 40 experts from policy making, human rights groups, activists, law enforcement, social media companies, and academia. The diverse background and expertise of the participants enabled ...

The workshop format is designed to encourage dialogue and debate. In order to do so, each session will begin with 3-4 participants offering opening remarks of approximately 10 minutes to help frame the discussion, overview current policy or practice, offer a specific case study or example, present recent research findings, outline a current advocacy campaign ...

by Rebecca MacKinnon In response to the tragic massacre in Paris, the French government has called for UN member states to work together on an international legal framework that would place greater responsibility on social networks and other Internet platforms for terrorist use of their services. In addressing the problem of terrorist use of social networking ...

by Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin In the past two decades we have passed through three phases of media ecology, and each has shaped a different way media have entered into the operations and understandings of war and conflict. The 1990s saw the final stage of broadcast era war. National and satellite television and the press had ...

As VOX-Pol’s March workshop in Budapest on the role of social media and internet companies in responding to violent online political extremism draws nearer, its exciting line-up of speakers is continuing to grow. Twitter will be there along with representatives from other social media giants. Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN Bureau Chief, blogger, and co-founder of Global ...

by Joe Galvin It has been 11 years since U.S. President George W. Bush gave his ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln signaling the end of major combat operations in Iraq. “In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed,” Bush said. It was a speech that was to ...

Welcome to Vol. 2, Iss. 1 of the VOX-Pol Newsletter. Year 1 of VOX-Pol was a resounding success. In the 12 months to December 2014, we hosted three events to which we welcomed 163 attendees from 24 countries (12 EU Member States and 12 non-EU countries). Our website has gathered 20,000 page-views by 5,000 visitors ...

by Ian Brown The second Vox-Pol workshop, on the ethics and politics of online monitoring of violent extremism, took place in Brussels from 19-20 January. Around thirty experts – from law enforcement and intelligence agencies, governments and parliaments, civil society, and universities – met for two days to discuss the challenges that have dominated the ...

by Eliot Higgins In recent years, content shared via social media from conflict war zones has allowed us to gain a far deeper understanding of the on-the-ground realities of specific conflicts than previously possible. This presents a real opportunity for providing robust evidence which can underpin foreign and security policymaking about emerging, or rapidly escalating, ...

VOX-Pol’s Principle Investigator Dr Maura Conway and Professor Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), a VOX-Pol partner institution, appeared on VRT, Belgium’s Flemish language public broadcaster, earlier this month. Professor Brown and Dr Conway discussed the role of the Internet in violent extremism and the social media strategies of radical groups such as ...