Social Media

Since late 2016, researchers came to acknowledge both ISIS’ territorial decline and much reduced visibility on mainstream social media networks. They note that its online community of supporters have migrated to encrypted communication channels and that its territory in the Levant has shrunk considerably, which—according to a recent ICSR estimate—impacted on the organisation’s financial resources. ...

In one 24-hour period, 65% of Twitter accounts tweeting out-links to IS propaganda were suspended within 17 hours Focus of online disruption on IS allows other jihadi groups to outpace them on social media VOX-Pol researchers from Dublin City University, together with colleagues from the University of Sussex, have found that the social media platform, ...

By Glenda Cooper Some of the most powerful stories about the atrocity in recent Manchester have been told online: whether pictures of the missing, the videos taken in the aftermath or the hashtags such as #roomformanchester or #acityunited showing the city’s resilience. But there are those who have also felt under pressure from journalists. Twitter ...

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 ...

On 15 May 2017 VOX-Pol’s Coordinator, DCU’s Prof. Maura Conway, gave a keynote address at Dublin’s Institute of International and European Affairs (IIEA), “Ireland’s leading think tank on European and International affairs.” In her address, Prof. Conway detailed the development of IS’s online strategy from 2014 to the present, with a particular focus on online-offline ...

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 ...

This Blog post is a product of the ESRC-funded Youth Extremisms Research Seminar Series. By Prof. Hilary Pilkington On the heels of significant electoral successes and several instances of extraordinary extremist violence, there has been renewed political, media, and scholarly attention to the growth of extremism in Europe and, in particular, to the role of youth in ...

By Emma Llansó On 5 December, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube announced their intent to begin collaborating on the removal of terrorist propaganda across their services. Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) is deeply concerned that this joint project will create a precedent for cross-site censorship and will become a target for governments and private actors seeking to ...

This year’s wild presidential campaign was not only a test of two very different politicians but of humanity in general. Because social media is now far more entrenched than four years ago, we were effectively subjected to a giant, real-world experiment. The research question: how exactly do we treat one another when sensitive matters of ...

VOX-Pol, in conjunction with two other EU FP7-funded projects, INFOCORE and MeCoDem, held a joint workshop themed “Social Media, Conflict and Democracy: Utopian Visions, Dystopian Futures and Pragmatic Policies” at the Press Club Brussels on Friday, November 18. Among the central questions addressed in the workshop entitled “Social Media, Conflict & Democracy: Utopian Visions, Dystopian Futures ...