Blog
The Metaverse Offers a Future Full of Potential – for Terrorists and Extremists, Too
February 2, 2022
By Joel S. Elson, Austin C. Doctor, and Sam Hunter The metaverse is coming. Like all technological innovation, it brings new opportunities and new risks. The metaverse is an immersive virtual reality version of the internet where people can interact with digital objects and digital representations of themselves and others, and can move more or less freely ...
Blog
‘Terrorism Informatics’ Part IV: Predicting Extremist Behaviour
March 24, 2021
This is the fourth and final in a series of four original Blog posts; the first is HERE the second is HERE the third is HERE. [Ed.] By Matti Pohjonen The previous cluster of methods looked at in the blog post series included methods developed to extrapolate insight from the content produced online and on social ...
Blog
‘Terrorism Informatics’ Part III: Analysing Extremist Content
March 17, 2021
This is the third in a series of four original Blog posts; the first is HERE and the second is HERE. [Ed.] By Matti Pohjonen The previous blog posts looked at the costs and benefits of using network analysis to identify extremist networks. It suggested that one challenge in such network analysis-based research approaches is ...
Blog
‘Terrorism Informatics’ Part II: Identifying Extremist Networks
March 10, 2021
This is the second in a series of four original Blog posts; the first is HERE. [Ed.] By Matti Pohjonen The first blog post in this series explored how researchers interested in computational methods can assess the trade-off between the validity of the methods used and the potentially adverse social costs of using them in ...
Blog
‘Terrorism Informatics’ Part I: A Framework for Researchers
March 3, 2021
This series of four blog posts builds on discussions had during the ‘Inside the Black Box of “Terrorism Informatics”: A Cost-benefit Analysis of Using Computational Techniques in Violent Online Political Extremism Research’ workshop organised by VOX-Pol in 2018. [Ed.] By Matti Pohjonen One of the most pressing challenges in research on violent online extremism is ...
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How Big Tech Designs its Own Rules of Ethics to Avoid Scrutiny and Accountability
June 20, 2019
By David Watts Data ethics is now a cause célèbre. “Digital ethics and privacy” shot into research and advisory company Gartner’s top ten strategic technology trends for 2019. Before that it barely raised a mention. In the past year governments, corporations and policy and technology think tanks have published data ethics guides. An entire cohort ...
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Big Tech is Overselling AI as the Solution to Online Extremism
February 6, 2019
By Kyle Matthews & Nicolai Pogadl In mid-September 2017 the European Union threatened to fine the Big Tech companies if they did not remove terrorist content within one hour of appearing online. The change came because rising tensions are now developing and being played out on social media platforms. Social conflicts that once built up in ...
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Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Online Content Moderation
July 11, 2018
By Nick Feamster This post contains reflections from a Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society workshop on the use of artificial intelligence in governing communication online that took place earlier this year [Ed.] Context In the United States and Europe, many platforms that host user content, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, have enjoyed safe harbor protections for the ...
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Online Extremism: UK Government’s Islamic State Blocking Tool is Neat but Incomplete
March 28, 2018
By Raheel Nawaz The UK government – with considerable pomp and ceremony – recently unveiled a new online tool for detection and removal of jihadi videos boasting a high success rate. It has been claimed by the Home Office that the machine learning tool, which the government developed with ASI Data Science, can identify 94% ...