News
Open, multi-stakeholder discussions necessary to tackle use of social media as a recruitment tool for radical groups
March 16, 2015
Social media companies, law enforcement agencies and free speech activists all agree that open discussions among them are useful and necessary in dealing with the issue of social media being used as a recruitment tool by violent radical groups such as ISIS, VOX-Pol’s Dr. Maura Conway has said. Speaking to techPresident shortly after conclusion of ...
Blog
Two-Day Workshop on the Role of Social Media and Internet Companies in Responding to Violent Online Extremism
March 11, 2015
by Anna Orosz The Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary hosted the third VOX-Pol workshop on 5 – 6 March with the participation of nearly 40 experts from policy making, human rights groups, activists, law enforcement, social media companies, and academia. The diverse background and expertise of the participants enabled ...
News
VOX-Pol talks to Belgian public broadcaster about the online strategies of radical groups
February 3, 2015
VOX-Pol’s Principle Investigator Dr Maura Conway and Professor Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), a VOX-Pol partner institution, appeared on VRT, Belgium’s Flemish language public broadcaster, earlier this month. Professor Brown and Dr Conway discussed the role of the Internet in violent extremism and the social media strategies of radical groups such as ...
Blog
Down the (White) Rabbit Hole: The Extreme Right and Online Recommender Systems
December 1, 2014
by Derek O’Callaghan YouTube’s status as the most popular video sharing platform means that it is especially useful to political extremists in their efforts to influence a wide audience. We often see links to associated videos and channels on YouTube being propagated on other social media platforms such as Twitter. In this analysis, we were ...
Blog
Coming Face to Face With the New Normal in Internet Research
November 10, 2014
by Elizabeth Buchanan When news of the Facebook contagion study hit, I was presenting a session on research ethics to the VOX-Pol summer school at Dublin City University. I had intended to discuss the Belfast Project as an example of social, behavioural, and educational research gone badly—indeed, this project had international intrigue, raised serious issues ...