Artificial Intelligence

By Heron Lopes On March 6th, the EU DisinfoLab will host a webinar discussing the findings of “Melodies of Malice”, one of the papers featured in this blog post. For more details and registration, visit: EU DisinfoLab Webinars – Melodies of Malice. Introduction Research on extremism and counter-terrorism has long underscored the role of far-right and extremist music ...

By Daniel E. Levenson Successful ideologues and leaders in extremist movements have long been aware of the power that misleading, but powerfully Manichean, pseudo-historical narratives can have on audiences. The foundation of this propagandistic material is often rooted in self-serving mythologies which justify the scapegoating of others and validation of the deeply felt grievances that ...

By Joel S. Elson, Austin C. Doctor, and Sam Hunter The metaverse is coming. Like all technological innovation, it brings new opportunities and new risks. The metaverse is an immersive virtual reality version of the internet where people can interact with digital objects and digital representations of themselves and others, and can move more or less freely ...

This is the fourth and final in a series of four original Blog posts; the first is HERE the second is HERE the third is HERE. [Ed.] By Matti Pohjonen The previous cluster of methods looked at in the blog post series included methods developed to extrapolate insight from the content produced online and on social ...

This is the third in a series of four original Blog posts; the first is HERE and the second is HERE. [Ed.] By Matti Pohjonen The previous blog posts looked at the costs and benefits of using network analysis to identify extremist networks. It suggested that one challenge in such network analysis-based research approaches is ...

This is the second in a series of four original Blog posts; the first is HERE. [Ed.] By Matti Pohjonen The first blog post in this series explored how researchers interested in computational methods can assess the trade-off between the validity of the methods used and the potentially adverse social costs of using them in ...

This series of four blog posts builds on discussions had during the ‘Inside the Black Box of “Terrorism Informatics”: A Cost-benefit Analysis of Using Computational Techniques in Violent Online Political Extremism Research’ workshop organised by VOX-Pol in 2018. [Ed.] By Matti Pohjonen One of the most pressing challenges in research on violent online extremism is ...

By David Watts Data ethics is now a cause célèbre. “Digital ethics and privacy” shot into research and advisory company Gartner’s top ten strategic technology trends for 2019. Before that it barely raised a mention. In the past year governments, corporations and policy and technology think tanks have published data ethics guides. An entire cohort ...

By Kyle Matthews & Nicolai Pogadl In mid-September 2017 the European Union threatened to fine the Big Tech companies if they did not remove terrorist content within one hour of appearing online. The change came because rising tensions are now developing and being played out on social media platforms. Social conflicts that once built up in ...

By Nick Feamster This post contains reflections from a Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society workshop on the use of artificial intelligence in governing communication online that took place earlier this year [Ed.] Context In the United States and Europe, many platforms that host user content, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, have enjoyed safe harbor protections for the ...