Social Media

By Neil Shortland and Allyssa McCabe In the weeks following two mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, police forces across the United States made more than 20 arrests based on threats made on social media. Police in Florida, for example, arrested an alleged white supremacist who, police said, threatened a shooting at a ...

Deplatforming terrorists from messaging apps may damage existing networks, but those who remain often double down in their beliefs. By Amarnath Amarasingam Earlier this week, a fellow terrorism researcher and friend sent me a text which stated: “TamTam is amazing. I missed all the early ISIS stuff on Telegram. Now I feel like I was ...

In cooperation with French media Le Monde (in English here), the EU DisinfoLab helped expose a French white supremacist network that uses deceptive Facebook pages to attract visitors on their website to generate revenue from online advertisements, and sell racist products as a means to support their activities. Key takeaways from our study We uncovered ...

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 Wasim Ahmed This post builds upon the 2015, and 2017 editions of this post, captures key trends and events which are shaping social media research for social scientists and provides a collection of research methods and tools for the analysis of social media data. Since the 2017 edition of this blog post, I have ...

Incels are a danger to society and to themselves. Technology has made the problem worse, but it can also help fix it. Involuntary celibates, or incels, believe that a socio-genetic conspiracy theory is preventing them from having sexual relationships with women. Denied their right to sex because society has deemed them unworthy, some of their ...

By Linda Schlegel The rise of social media usage as an everyday activity for millions of citizens has been accompanied by a discussion about the dangers of this development. Echo chambers or “filter bubbles” are often mentioned in this regard.[1] Both concepts refer to the possibility that social media users only engage with content that ...

By Pamela Ligouri Bunker and Robert J. Bunker The 2019 Terrorism and Social Media (TASM) Conference took place on 25 and 26 June 2019 at Swansea University Bay Campus, Wales, United Kingdom. The conference was organised by Swansea University’s Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law and its Cyber Threats Research Centre (CYTREC), with the support ...

By Philippa Smith When it comes to debates about free speech that needs to be protected and hate speech that needs to be legislated, the idiom of “drawing the line” is constantly referenced by politicians, journalists and academics. It has surfaced again as New Zealanders struggle to comprehend the abhorrence of the Christchurch terror attack and ...

By Martin Innes, Helen Innes, and Diyana Dobreva Terrorist attacks are fundamentally designed to ‘terrorise, polarise and mobilise’ different segments of the public. That this is so was tragically underscored by the recent events in New Zealand, where the perpetrator very obviously and self-consciously prepared a messaging campaign to accompany his acts of violence. Recognising these ...