Terrorism

By Amelia Cho Introduction The rapid advancement of digital communication technologies has intensified the debate between national security and user privacy. End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is widely regarded as a fundamental tool for protecting digital communications, yet it is also exploited by terrorist organisations to evade surveillance. This blog examines the challenges posed by E2EE in ...

By Alastair Reed, Andrew Glazzard, Samantha Treacy Ever since the rapid rise of the so-called Islamic State and its effective use of online propaganda to recruit and radicalize individuals, countering the communication strategies of terrorists and violent extremists has been a top priority for governments and policymakers. Early approaches generally fell into two categories: disrupting ...

By Franziska Selzer To combat terrorist content online, platforms must take action. Meta, for instance, reported taking action, including removing content, covering disturbing content with a warning, and disabling accounts, against 30.8 million pieces of terrorist content on Facebook in the first three quarters of 2024. Of this content, over 99% was found by Meta ...

By Jonathan Pieslak On 14 June 2024, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a US-based “anti-hate” organization focusing primarily on antisemitism, posted a provocatively entitled article, “GAI Music Creation Tool Suno Has Been Weaponized to Promote Hate”. The report highlights the ways in which Suno, a generative artificial intelligence (GAI) music-creation platform, can be exploited to create ...

By Heron Lopes On March 6th, the EU DisinfoLab will host a webinar discussing the findings of “Melodies of Malice”, one of the papers featured in this blog post. For more details and registration, visit: EU DisinfoLab Webinars – Melodies of Malice. Introduction Research on extremism and counter-terrorism has long underscored the role of far-right and extremist music ...

By Kate Scott On December 6, 2024, the intelligence agencies of the Five Eyes alliance—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States—released a jointly authored report outlining the increasing concern of violent extremism among youth. The report sheds light on how extremist content online is being used to recruit, groom, and mobilize ...

By Ryan Scrivens, Thomas W. Wojciechowski, Tiana Gaudette, and Richard Frank There is an ongoing need for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to identify and examine the online posting behaviors of violent extremists prior to their engagement in violence offline, but little is empirically known about their online presence generally or differences in their posting behaviors ...

By Daniel E. Levenson In the early to mid-19th century the organizations and ideologues who would form the vanguard of modern terrorism did a remarkable job of leverage emerging technology for both training and operational purposes. This often took the form of experimentation with new (and often unregulated) materials such as dynamite and crude IEDs ...

By Sophia Rothut, Darian Harff & Cornelius Puschmann In today’s digitalised world, social media platforms have evolved into powerful channels for disseminating political information and shaping political opinion. While these platforms can enhance democratic processes by, for instance, increasing opportunities to participate in political discussions or acquire political knowledge, they also pose challenges, particularly with ...

By Kamil Yilmaz and Joe Whittaker The past decade has seen several lone actor attacks conducted by men who identify as involuntary celibate (incels). The movement is well-known for being an online community of men who go online to discuss their inability to form sexual or romantic relationships, often resulting in extremely misogynistic online posts. ...