Online extremism

By Sam Jackson For more than a decade, we’ve been debating how to respond to hate speech – broadly understood as “offensive discourse targeting a group or an individual based on inherent characteristics (such as race, religion or gender).”1 The status quo in the United States holds that governments may not restrict speech outside of narrow exceptions (for ...

On 2 May 2022, First Monday published a Special Issue exploring societal resilience to online polarisation and extremism, co-edited by Amy-Louise Watkin (VOX-Pol and USW), Vivian Gerrand (Deakin University), and Maura Conway (VOX-Pol and DCU). The seven articles in this special issue were selected from those delivered at a series of workshops undertaken by the ...

By Dieter Loraine Yet again during this COVID pandemic, terrorist and violent extremist organisations have proven adept at using the internet and digital technology to further their aims, reach new audiences and recruit people to commit violent acts. Government policies and responses at all levels have been in a state of constant catch up to ...

By Nathalie Collins New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern has called for “ethical algorithms” to help stop online radicalisation. She made her call at the second summit of the “Christchurch Call” for action to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online. The first Christchurch Call summit was convened by Ardern and French president Emmanuel Macron ...

Want to submit a blog post? Click here. By Alexander Mitchell Lee YouTube has gained a reputation for facilitating far-right radicalisation and spreading antisocial ideas. However, in an interesting twist, the same subversive, comedic, satiric and ironic tactics used by far-right internet figures are now being countered by a group of leftwing YouTubers known as “BreadTube”. By making videos ...

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 ...

VOX-Pol expertise has been featured in the news since the storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021. The events, which led to five deaths, sparked a discussion about online deplatforming. VOX-Pol Fellows, such as JM Berger, Bharath Ganesh, Sam Jackson and Maura Conway have been quoted in The New York Times, VOX, ...