Welcome to Volume 11, Issue 1 of the VOX-Pol Newsletter. INTRODUCING THE NEW VOX-Pol WEBSITE The VOX-Pol website is relaunched! The new site has been refreshed and redesigned to reflect our work as an international research network on online extremism and terrorism. Alongside the Events, Blog, News and Newsletter pages, it now also features: Next
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Trolling and doxxing: Graduate students sharing their research online speak out about hate
By Alex Borkowski, York University, Canada; Marion Tempest Grant, York University, Canada, and Natalie Coulter, York University, Canada An increasingly volatile online environment is affecting our society, including members of the academic community and research they pursue. Graduate students are especially vulnerable to online hate, because cultivating a visible social media presence is considered essential
A dictionary of the manosphere: five terms to understand the language of online male supremacists
By Robert Lawson, Birmingham City University Thot. White knight. Red pilled. Cuck. Beta. Soyboy. Unicorn. Chad. To many people, these words won’t mean much. To others, they are a core part of the vocabulary of the “manosphere” – a collection of websites, social media accounts and forums dedicated to men’s issues, from health and fitness
Rethinking Online Radicalization
This article seeks to re-ontologize online radicalization. Individuals becoming terrorists after being exposed to online content have become a prescient concern for academics, policy makers, and journalists. Existing theoretical contributions to the concept have assumed that there are two ontological domains—online and offline—that can be meaningfully separated. This article will draw from several arguments from
The Trolls Disappear in the Light: Swedish Experiences of Mediated Sexualised Hate Speech in the Aftermath of Behring Breivik
Feminist journalists have come to expect special resistance, and even threats, from men’s groups as part of their work as journalists. However, the biggest threats might not originate in men’s groups’ activities. A big threat currently comes from Internet trolls’ responses to individuals who engage in hate‐provoked and hate‐provoking attacks on women as women. This
Exploring Radical Right-Wing Posting Behaviors Online
In recent years, researchers have shown a vested interest in developing advanced information technologies, machine-learning algorithms, and risk-assessment tools to detect and analyze radical content online, with increased attention on identifying violent extremists or measuring digital pathways of violent radicalization. Yet overlooked in this evolving space has been a systematic examination of what constitutes radical
Branding the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
This article will explore three crucial parameters that have been taken into consideration to attract millennials towards the Islamic State or Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) brand: the first parameter is story creation around the historical significance of Islamic prophecies justifying the ISIS brand. Second is the symbolisms attached to the ISIS brand
An Intelligence Reserve Corps to Counter Terrorist Use of the Internet
“Never before in history have terrorists had such easy access to the minds and eyeballs of millions,” declared one journalistic account of the Islamic State’s propaganda machine and proficient use of Twitter, Facebook, bots, and other modern means of getting its message out. Such views that the group’s “mastery of modern digital tools” has transformed
Terrorists’ Use of the Internet
Terrorist use of the Internet has become a focus of media, policy, and scholarly attention in recent years. Terrorists use the Internet in a variety of ways, the most important being for propaganda purposes and operations-related content, but it is also potentially a means or target of attack. This book presents revised versions of a
Toward a Framework Understanding of Online Programs for Countering Violent Extremism
There is an emerging consensus that ideologically-based narratives play a central role in encouraging and sustaining radicalization to violence, and that preventing, arresting, or reversing radicalization requires some means by which to address the effects of these narratives. Countering violent extremism (CVE) is a broad umbrella phrase that covers a wide array of approaches that