by Athina Karatzogianni One of the key issues the West has had to face in countering Islamic State (IS) is the jihadi group’s mastery of online propaganda, seen in hundreds of thousands of messages celebrating the atrocities against civilians and spreading the message of radicalisation. It seems clear that efforts to counter IS online are missing…
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by Robyn Torok While the average person was getting on with life in Paris before last Friday’s terror bombings and shootings, Twitter threads in Arabic from the Middle East were urging for attacks to be launched upon coalition forces in their home countries. “Advance, advance – forward, forward” they said, regarding Paris. Iraqi forces had…
by Elizabeth Pearson In the past two years, the so-called Islamic State (IS) has made Twitter its own, many of its supporters even describing the social media forum as an IS ‘wilayat’ or ‘province’. As academics and policy-makers alike become increasingly aware of the role of the online environment in radicalisation, the use of Twitter…
by J.M Berger The world continues to deal with the offline consequences of how ISIS works online, hunting among the fringes of society for those rare individuals who can be convinced to act on its behalf. Its success comes in part from volume – social media makes it possible to sift efficiently through more potential…
by Helen Vatsikopoulos At the ongoing coronial inquest into the deaths arising from last year’s Lindt café siege in Sydney, experts cannot agree whether Man Haron Monis was a radicalised terrorist or a mentally unstable lone wolf who used radical Islam as a “crutch”. Throughout the inquest, prosecutors, solicitors and detectives are being grilled…
by Steven Luckert In 1924, Adolf Hitler described propaganda as “a terrible weapon in the hands of an expert.” For two decades, the Nazis showed the world what a devastating weapon it could be. They won over millions of Germans to their extremist goals in a democracy by branding their movement with powerful symbols and…
by Andrew Murray Last week reports emerged in the media that the proposed Investigatory Powers Bill may lead to the banning of popular communications apps Snapchat, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. This was in many ways not news as the same reports had appeared in January but with the Home Secretary announcing that the Bill would be published in the…
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…
by Massimo Leone On the one hand, terrorism is the antithesis of communication. It does not aim at transmitting any message to its victims, but at annihilating them. On the other hand, yet, terrorism is extremely powerful communication for those who witness the tragedy, directly or through the media, and are either terrified or fascinated…
by Andrea Cerase, Elena D’Angelo and Claudia Santoro The rise of racism in Europe In recent years online racism has seen a quick and serious growth in many European and non-European countries, till to become a worrying global phenomenon.(1) One of the most striking examples of such process is the rise of White Supremacist Movements online. Their strategy…
