Online radicalisation

By Pamela Ligouri Bunker and Robert J. Bunker The 2019 Terrorism and Social Media (TASM) Conference took place on 25 and 26 June 2019 at Swansea University Bay Campus, Wales, United Kingdom. The conference was organised by Swansea University’s Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law and its Cyber Threats Research Centre (CYTREC), with the support ...

By Mike Caulfield Sam prides himself on questioning conventional wisdom and subjecting claims to intellectual scrutiny. For kids today, that means Googling stuff. One might think these searches would turn up a variety of perspectives, including at least a few compelling counterarguments. One would be wrong. The Google searches flooded his developing brain with endless ...

By Laurence Bindner This post was originally published on our Blog in French in January 2019. It was cross-posted with permission from Ultima Ratio, IFRI’s security and defence Blog. This is its first time appearing in English. [Ed.] The appeal trial of the administrators of the Ansar al-Haqq forum got under way at the Paris Regional ...

New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern and French President Macron are co-hosting a meeting in Paris today to discuss a New Zealand-spearheaded plan, named the “Christchurch Call,” to eliminate violent extremist and terrorist content from the Internet. The below post summarises the tech sector’s response(s) to the exploitation of their services by the Christchurch terrorist’s sympathisers ...

This Blog post is a lightly edited version of a report prepared by the EU Internet Referral Unit in Europol and circulated to law enforcement agencies and member states in October 2018. It is appearing here publicly for the first time, at the request of Europol. [Ed.] Key Takeaways Non-violent material is integral to terrorists’ propaganda ...

By Anne Speckhard and Ardian Shajkovci With the collapse of the so-called “Islamic State” in Iraq, and much of Syria, an immediate corresponding and steady decline occurred in ISIS’ strategic communication and online propaganda activities. However, the group’s “virtual Caliphate” is rebounding and still remains very much alive today – it continues to create new content, ...

VOX-Pol contributed to the inaugural Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN) Civil Society Empowerment Programme (CSEP) campaigns event in Brussels this week. We therefore thought we’d share some insights from a previous RAN event focused on online CVE. [Ed.] Introduction It is an essential part of extremist propaganda and outreach to not only communicate their messages to ...

Par Laurence Bindner Le procès des administrateurs du forum Ansar al-Haqq s’est déroulé au Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris les 4, 5 et 6 Juillet 2018. Le quatre prévenus (David Ramassamy, Nordine Zaggi, Farouk ben Abbes et Léonard Lopez – ce dernier actuellement détenu par les forces kurdes dans un camp de Syrie), ont ...

By Loránd Bodó Understanding terrorists’ use of the Internet is of paramount importance, especially in the context of today’s digital efforts to counter violent extremism. In particular, IS and its unprecedented, successful, multilingual and multimedia online campaigns have led to a surge of academic interest across the globe since 2014. Tech and social media companies ...

By Daniel Baldino & Kosta Lucas The Internet’s precise role in the process of radicalisation remains vexing. You can lead a person to a bomb-making manual, but you can’t make them use it. Radicalisation is a social process. It refers to a means by which an individual or group embraces an extreme ideology and rejects ...