Welcome to Volume 8 Issue 1 of the VOX-Pol Newsletter.
If you have colleagues or friends who may be interested in the content of our newsletter, or any events or research carried out by VOX-Pol, please forward this to them and encourage them to subscribe via our website. Follow us on Twitter @VOX_Pol for live updates and releases.
Yours Sincerely,
The VOX-Pol Team
FEATURED VOX-Pol PUBLICATION AND EVENT
Introducing a new VOX-Pol publication on ‘Terrorism Informatics’ by Digital Media Researcher and VOX-Pol Fellow, Matti Pohjonen. The report is being published as a series of four Blog posts throughout March 2021, the first A Framework for Researchers is already online, and will be followed weekly by posts on Identifying Extremist Networks, Analysing Extremist Content, and Predicting Extremist Behaviour.
At the end of March, issues from the blog posts will be discussed in a live webinar. In the webinar, Matti Pohjonen, Eugenia Siapera (University College Dublin) and Maura Conway (VOX-Pol Coordinator) will discuss the topic of Terrorism Informatics and how researchers can ethically engage in these kinds of analyses.
The webinar will take place at 16:00 (GMT) on Tuesday 30 March. Keep an eye on the VOX-Pol Twitter page and website for updates.
THE VOX-Pol BLOG
Our VOX-Pol Blog posts continue to get great traction. Within a few days of the events at the US capitol on 6 Jan., for example, the post Gab.com: the Pro-Trump Alternative to Social Media by Jordan McSwiney and Greta Jasser–originally published in the October 2020 edition of e-Extreme, the newsletter of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Standing Group on Extremism & Democracy—received over 15,000 views.
See HERE for information on contributing to our weekly Blog.
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
VOX-Pol Research Fellow, JM Berger, has released a dystopian fiction book titled Optimal. The book is informed by his research in extremism, terrorism and how bad actors exploit technology, especially the Internet and social media. He can be heard discussing the book on security and technology podcast, The Loopcast.
JM’s non-fiction book, Extremism (MIT Press, August 2018), was launched at VOX-Pol’s 2018 biennial conference.
IN THE MEDIA
News by and featuring VOX-Pol fellows and researchers.
- Trump is gone. But the threat of right-wing violence that arose under his watch remains, VOX, 20 January 2021
- Study on Social Media Use in Ethiopia Maps Frequency of Hate and Dangerous Speech at Tadias Magazine, Stenaw, 20 January 2021
- Root Causes of Violent Extremism in Africa: Understanding Multi-Disciplinary Factors, The Street, 19 January 2021
- ‘This Kettle Is Set to Boil’: New Evidence Points to Riot Conspiracy, The New York Times, 19 January 2021
- Conspiracy Charges Filed Over Capitol Riot, The Wall Street Journal, 19 January 2021
- Is deplatforming extremists effective or dangerous? Experts weigh in, NBC News, 18 January 2021
- Deplatforming works, but it’s not enough to fix Facebook and Twitter, Wired, 15 January 2021
- US Capitol attack exposes depth of America’s problem with white extremism, The World, 13 January 2021
- Capitol attack forces reckoning with radical, right-wing political factions, PBS, 13 January 2021
- How ‘The Turner Diaries’ Incites White Supremacists, The New York Times, 12 January 2021
- Analysis: Will deplatforming make Trump and the far-right vanish, move — or radicalize further?, CNN, 12 January 2021