Social Media Analysis

By Reem Ahmed and Daniela Pisoiu Social media is attractive to the far right in the same way as it is to other extremist groups. It offers a more direct, personal communication channel with potential audiences (Ernst et al. 2017: 1357). Moreover, in the absence of traditional media ‘gatekeepers’, the far right are able to ...

By Anne Speckhard, Ardian Shajkovci & Lorand Bodo This blog post synopsises a study that attempted to intervene with over fifty English-speaking Facebook accounts endorsing, promoting, and following ISIS. Methodology and Research Design For this study, several anonymized Facebook accounts were used to identify English-speaking radicalized Facebook profiles as our target for an online counter-narrative intervention. ...

By Maura Conway and Suraj Lakhani This post is based on findings contained in the VOX-Pol report Disrupting Daesh: Measuring Takedown of Online Terrorist Material and its Impacts published on 15 August 2017. Alongside the fierce battles that have been raging of late in key strongholds of so-called Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq, intense battles against ...

This blog post is a follow-up to last week’s post on Twitter activity following the terrorist attack that took place in Nice, France, on 14 July, 2016 and associated real-world events during the ensuing week. It is part of a larger project exploring hashtag activism in CVE. The first posts traced the online reaction to ...

This blog post and a follow-up next week analyse Twitter activity following the terrorist attack that took place in Nice, France on 14 July, 2016 and associated real-world events during the ensuing week. It is part of a larger project exploring hashtag activism in CVE. This first posts traces the online reaction to developments during ...

by Wasim Ahmed I have a social media research blog where I find and write about tools that can be used to capture and analyse data from social media platforms. My PhD looks at Twitter data for health, such as the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. I am increasingly asked why I am looking at Twitter, ...

VOX-Pol participated in the Public Safety Canada Kanishka Project Symposium held in Ottawa, Canada from 30-31 March 2015. The Symposium surveyed social media/online-based research conducted under the Kanishka Project, a Canadian government initiative to invest in research on terrorism and counter-terrorism. The Symposium assessed what has been learned during the project, particularly in relation to ...

by Eliot Higgins In recent years, content shared via social media from conflict war zones has allowed us to gain a far deeper understanding of the on-the-ground realities of specific conflicts than previously possible. This presents a real opportunity for providing robust evidence which can underpin foreign and security policymaking about emerging, or rapidly escalating, ...