VOX-Pol Newsletter 12(12)

Posted on December 9, 2025 (December 4, 2025)

Welcome to Volume 12, Issue 12 of the monthly VOX-Pol Newsletter.

RECENT VOX-Pol EVENTS

VOX-Pol launched the report ‘Negotiating Responses to Online Terrorism Threats in the EU: State-Platform Diplomacy 2015 – 2019‘ on Monday 17 November. At the webinar, Valère Ndior and Gavin Sullivan discussed the report with author Marguerite Borelli and host, VOX-Pol Coordinator, Stuart Macdonald. You can watch the recorded launch event on our YouTube page. 

Also on YouTube is the recent online seminar ‘Under the Radar: Understanding the Salafi-jihadi terrorist online information ecosystem‘, which took place on Wednesday 3 December. Moign Khawaja, Dublin City University, chaired the event with five presentations and a Q&A session. A recording of this event is available on request. Please email info@voxpol.eu if you would like access.

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS: VOX-Pol SUMMER SCHOOL 2026

The 2026 VOX-Pol Summer School is taking place at Swansea University, Singleton Campus, from Monday 22 to Friday 26 June 2026. This week-long course is designed to provide PhD students and early career researchers with an expert-led curriculum on the role of the Internet in violent extremism and terrorism.

The course will include a range of teaching and learning styles, including lectures, workshops, and small-group activities. It will cover a range of issues and topics, such as: how violent extremists use the Internet; exploitation of online platforms; how we respond to this threat; research methods and analysis; ethics; and gender perspectives.

Find out how to participate at this link.

2025 AVERT INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM

The 2025 AVERT International Research Symposium, co-sponsored by VOX-Pol and TASM, was held at Deakin University, Melbourne, on 24-26 November. The theme of the event was: Signal or noise? Navigating the changing nature of violent extremism online. Recordings of the keynotes and sessions are available on the AVERT YouTube channel.

Stuart Macdonald and Ali Fisher presented the VOX-Pol Workshop on day two, titled: ‘Opportunities to enhance strategies for disrupting online networks involved in illegal content distribution’. This session drew on insights from the recent VOX-Pol report ‘Gore and Violent Extremism‘ and personal experience gathered over the last 15 years of working on detection, intervention, and disruption efforts across numerous online harms.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS AND EVENTS FROM VOX-Pol MEMBERS

Miron Lakomy and Ali Fisher, presenters at VOX-Pol’s most recent seminar, published the related article ‘Making terrorist content findable: search engines as a key to mitigating Salafi-jihadi persistent presence on the internet‘ in the Security Journal.

Anda Solea has two new publications in the past month, the first ‘Digital Subcultural Diffusion Theory: Rebranding the incel ideology through Looksmaxxing, Sub5s and the PSL scale‘ is open access and published by Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal. The second, a chapter in the book, Hate Crime Perpetrators: New Perspectives from Theory, Research and Practice, is titled ‘The Strategic Use of Gender-Based Hatred on TikTok: Hate Stratagems, Information Manipulation and Incel TikTok Creators‘. Contact the author for a copy.

Nicola Mathieson and Lydia Channon published an open access article that they had presented at the 2024 Terrorism and Social Media Conference, titled ‘Automated Detection of Mainstreamed Transphobic Content on YouTube‘, in the journal Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies.

David Wells’ research was featured in a Newsweek article exploring the risks of terrorist misuse of Gen AI and some of the ways in which governments should be responding to this emerging threat.

Elizabeth Pearson gave a keynote at the OSCE event Online Gender Based Violence and Radicalization to Violence in the Digital Age in Tirana, Albania. The title of the talk was: ‘Taking stock: Online Gender Based Violence, Misogyny and Radicalization to Violence in the Digital Age – Challenges and Solutions’.

Alexander Westphal and colleagues are giving a keynote panel at the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals meeting in Orlando, Florida, in early February 2026.  The panel, ‘When Nothing Matters: Personal Pain and Insularity as Drivers of Domestic Violent Extremism’ examines how social disconnection and psychological distress fuel radicalization, with an emphasis on the online context . Alexander Westphal’s component of the talk explores the intersection of autism spectrum disorder and extremism risk, clarifying that autism itself is not a risk factor but that the combination of ASD-related social challenges, persistent rejection, and trauma can create unique vulnerabilities to online radicalization and manipulation by extremist groups that externalize blame for social difficulties.

RECENTLY ON THE VOX-Pol BLOG

Recently published on the VOX-Pol Blog

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