Extremism

By Mark Dechesne At a time when world news headlines are dominated by Covid-19, we must not forget that for the past decade, the nations of Europe have been plagued by another fast-spreading and often deadly epidemic: the circulation of socially corrosive, extremist language via social media. This type of social media communication has helped ...

By Sian Tomkinson, Katie Attwell and Tauel Harper In May 2020, a 17-year-old boy in Toronto was charged with an act of terrorism in the alleged killing of a woman with a machete – the first time such a charge has been brought in a case involving “incel” ideology. Also in May, a 20-year-old man ...

VOX-Pol is pleased to present the latest report in the VOX-Pol publication series, titled Extreme Digital Speech: Contexts, Responses and Solutions, edited by Bharath Ganesh and Jonathan Bright. About the Report Extreme digital speech (EDS) is an emerging challenge that requires co-ordination between governments, civil society and the private sector. In this report, a range ...

By Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández and Joanne Gray People watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Over the past few years, the video sharing platform has come under fire for its role in spreading and amplifyingextreme views. YouTube’s video recommendation system, in particular, has been criticised for radicalising young people and steering viewers ...

By Elnura Alkanova Since the 2000s, social networks have been widely used both as platform for like-minded users and an instrument for spreading information and ideas. But the rapid dissemination of facts and opinions also results in an uncontrollable stream of information. As a result, we are witnessing an increasing number of posts with negative content ...

The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism held an event this morning, 6 December 2017, at Google’s Brussels’ offices.  The event featured representatives from GIFCT founder companies, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter, along with the EU Commission, EUROPOL, ICT4Peace, CDT, and others.  The first panel discussion and Q&A included stakeholders from agencies engaged in the ...

Dr. Caterina Froio joined the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) in December 2016 as a VOX-Pol Research Fellow. In December 2015, she was awarded a research grant from the City Hall of Paris for a research project dealing with far right ‘othering’ discourses online in France. She is currently expanding on this work within the broader ...