Violent online radicalisation

The discourse of violent online radicalisation has been mainstreamed, being increasingly prevalent in both policy circles and media representations. On 8 – 9 March 2016, VOX-Pol will convene a workshop at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg (IFSH) on critiquing the discourse of violent online radicalisation. The objective ...

By Irene McGinn and Adam Joinson This blog post explores the reasons why some online ideological groups take action while others do not and focuses on to what extent the online communications of ideological groups contribute to direct collective action. In order to address this question, we examined a number of online groups using a variety of ...

VOX-Pol contributed to this week’s [Y] Factor Conference, a Youth Conference organised by the trainees of the European Committee of the Regions in collaboration with CoR services at the end of their traineeship period. The main idea behind [Y] Factor is to tackle the topics and issues that concern young people by bringing together local ...

by Beatrice Berton and Patryk Pawlak Jihadist militants have long operated in the pockets of instability which stretch from Bamako to Bagdad. However, they have also been making the most of governance problems in the world’s biggest open space: the internet. Forced to confront this fact, the governments of France, the UK and the US, ...

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 ...

by Rebecca MacKinnon In response to the tragic massacre in Paris, the French government has called for UN member states to work together on an international legal framework that would place greater responsibility on social networks and other Internet platforms for terrorist use of their services. In addressing the problem of terrorist use of social networking ...

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 ...

Rebecca MacKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices Online and Director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at New America, testified on Tuesday before the the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Foreign Affairs’ Sub-committee on Terrorism, Non-Proliferation, and Trade on ‘The Evolution of Terrorist Propaganda: The Paris Attack and Social Media.’ MacKinnon will be speaking at VOX-Pol’s 5 – 6 March workshop at Central ...