Online radicalisation

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 ...

By Molly Land In the wake of the recent attacks in Manchester and London, British Prime Minister Theresa May has called on social media companies to eliminate “safe spaces” online for extremist ideology. Despite losing the majority in the recent election, she is moving forward with plans to regulate online communications, including in cooperation with ...

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 ...

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 ...

Our latest report is launched today, May 03, 2017, available now in the VOX-Pol Online Library VOX-Pol has released its latest report in the VOX-Pol publication series, titled ‘Research Perspectives on Online Radicalisation: A Literature Review, 2006—2016’. Other reports in the series have included: Check the Web: Assessing the Ethics and Politics of Policing the ...

By Bharath Ganesh In early March, the Home Office published new counter-terrorism statistics that indicated a significant increase in the arrest of ‘white’ extremists. Tabloids in the UK, including The Daily Mail, ran triumphant headlines claiming a crackdown on far-right extremism. Unfortunately, the data released by the Home Office does not support any such assertion. 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 Joe Whittaker There seems to be near-ubiquity between discussion of radicalisation to violent extremism and the Internet. Despite this, the study of online radicalisation remains under-researched and as a result ill-understood. This is, perhaps, surprising given the vast attention in the media that is given to the online presence of groups such as Islamic ...

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 ...