Social Media

By Elizabeth Pearson Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is now a national emergency. A new report by the UK National Police Chiefs’ Council this week noted VAWG-related crimes increased by 37% between 2018 and 2023, with male perpetrators ever younger. Much is technology-related, and police chiefs noted young men are being ‘radicalised’ into misogyny ...

By Steven Roberts, Monash University and Stephanie Wescott, Monash University Many parents are worried about their children using social media. But these concerns tend to focus on privacy, exposure to explicit material or contact with strangers. As researchers looking at sexism and misogyny in Australian schools and the influence of social media, we think it ...

By Ryan Scrivens For more on these findings and the nature of the study in general, see the full manuscript which was recently published open access in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. Despite the ongoing need for practitioners to identify violent right-wing extremists (RWEs) online before their engagement in violence offline, there is little empirical knowledge about their digital footprints in general ...

By Dr Melissa-Ellen Dowling Note: This blog post is a modified version of the article: Melissa-Ellen Dowling (2024) News to me: far-right news sharing on social media, Information, Communication & Society, 27:1, 39-55. To learn more about this research, please see the original study, available at: DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2023.2166796. How are extremist political ideologies communicated online? What enables political claims to gain traction ...

By Lee Jarvis and Stuart Macdonald The growing number of regulatory regimes aimed at moderating online terrorist and violent extremist content, coupled with more informal processes for law enforcement and other state actors to refer such content to tech companies, have been described as the public-private co-production of security. In this context, it is significant ...

Stuart Macdonald, Swansea University; Ashley A. Mattheis, Dublin City University, and David Wells, Swansea University Every minute, millions of social media posts, photos and videos flood the internet. On average, Facebook users share 694,000 stories, X (formerly Twitter) users post 360,000 posts, Snapchat users send 2.7 million snaps and YouTube users upload more than 500 ...

by Sam Jackson and JM Berger Generative AI tools have exploded in number and complexity within a few short years. Products such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, and countless others represent a massive leap forward over earlier efforts in both text and image generation. Some AI evangelists even suggest that these models could soon supplement or replace people in professional roles, including ...

By Tom Thorley & Erin Saltman This article summarises a recent paper published in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism that forms part of a special issue on the practicalities and complexities of (regulating) online terrorist content moderation. The special issue contains papers that were presented at Swansea University’s Terrorism and Social Media Conference 2022. Technical ...

By Reem Ahmed This article summarises a recent paper published in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism that forms part of a special issue on the practicalities and complexities of (regulating) online terrorist content moderation. The special issue contains papers that were presented at Swansea University’s Terrorism and Social Media Conference 2022. As part of its ...

By Amy-Louise Watkin This article summarises a recent paper published in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism that forms part of a special issue on the practicalities and complexities of (regulating) online terrorist content moderation. The special issue contains papers that were presented at Swansea University’s Terrorism and Social Media Conference 2022. Tech platforms have already ...