ISIS

The Terrorism and Social Media Conference (TASM) was held on 27 to 28 June in Swansea University. The event kicked off with a keynote speech by Prof. Bruce Hoffman from Georgetown University entitled “The Threat From ISIS and al Qaeda: Contextualising the Role of Social Media” in which he emphasised that social media has played a serious ...

This post is Part 2 of 2. Click here for Part 1 By Ahmet S. Yayla & Anne Speckhard Reaching out on to ISIS members via Telegram channels is a significant challenge for beginners. First of all, as the Telegram application is installed, the application copies all the contact numbers on one’s cell phone and connects the ...

By Ahmet S. Yayla & Anne Speckhard ISIS has been the most successful terrorist organization in history using social media and the Internet for distributing its propaganda, dissemination of its news and more importantly to communicate. There is no doubt that the frequency and quality of ISIS posts on the Internet, including their videos, memes ...

On 15 May 2017 VOX-Pol’s Coordinator, DCU’s Prof. Maura Conway, gave a keynote address at Dublin’s Institute of International and European Affairs (IIEA), “Ireland’s leading think tank on European and International affairs.” In her address, Prof. Conway detailed the development of IS’s online strategy from 2014 to the present, with a particular focus on online-offline ...

The mobilisation of women for the jihadist cause emerged in Spain within the framework of the current mobilisation in Western Europe linked to the conflict in Syria and Iraq and the appearance of the so called Islamic State (IS) as a new vanguard of global terrorism. The explicit call from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to women ...

By Lorand Bodo, M.A. & Anne Speckhard, Ph.D. As ISIS is rapidly losing its territory in Syria and Iraq they continue to win on the digital battlefield, maintaining a strong recruiting presence in the digital space[1]. As ISIS cadres inspire and even direct terrorist attacks on different continents, the West must realize that it is ...

By Joel Wing More than half of Mosul has fallen to Iraqi government forces and it is only a matter of time before the whole city is retaken. How is the Islamic State portraying this defeat? Has it changed its messaging since the start of the battle? Charlie Winter, a Senior Research Fellow at the ...

This post is Part 1 of 3. Background Previous research on terrorist use of the Internet generally discusses the opportunities offered by the Internet to terrorist groups. Such accounts implicitly view the interaction between the Internet and the user as uni-directional (i.e. exposure to Internet content may cause behaviour change). This lacks an acknowledgement that not ...

By Anne Speckhard, Ph.D. On International Women’s Day it seems important to recognize strong women and the unique characteristics of women to play important roles in defeating terrorism. In the past days, taking part in the Institute for Defense Studies and Analysis Combating Terrorism Conference in New Delhi, India, I had the opportunity to meet and listen to ...

On 13-14 February, VOX-Pol Programme Manager, Lisa McInerney, participated in the EU’s Radicalisation Awareness Network’s (RAN) Communication and Narratives Working Group’s latest meeting in Brussels. The meeting focused on how to measure the impact of online counter or alternative narrative campaigns, with the aim of making it easier for campaigners to evaluate and measure impact ...