Blog
Christchurch’s Legacy of Fighting Violent Extremism Online Must Go Further – Deep into the Dark Web
March 18, 2020
By Dr. Joe Burton It didn’t take long for a terrorist to show how hard it is to prevent violent extremist content being shared online. Within six months of the attacks at two Christchurch mosques on March 15 last year, which were live streamed on Facebook, a far-right terrorist’s attack at a German synagogue was ...
Blog
From the French Revolution, the First Amendment and the Third Reich to Twitter and Facebook: The Impact of Legal Histories on the Fight Against Online Extremism – Part 2: The United States
February 19, 2020
By Nery Ramati The need to develop legal tools in order to cope with the dangers of online extremism and terrorism has been an issue that has kept legislators, government officials, and security forces around the globe very busy in recent years. In liberal democracies, the legal challenges are intensified due to the obvious dangers ...
Blog
From the French Revolution, the First Amendment and the Third Reich to Twitter and Facebook: The Impact of Legal Histories on the Fight Against Online Extremism – Part 1: France
February 12, 2020
By Nery Ramati The need to develop legal tools in order to cope with the dangers of online extremism and terrorism has been an issue that has kept legislators, government officials, and security forces around the globe very busy in recent years. In liberal democracies, the legal challenges are intensified due to the obvious dangers ...
Blog
Exploring Canadian Far-Right Extremism on Facebook
February 5, 2020
By Ryan Scrivens and Amarnath Amarasingam Following the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Canadian right-wing extremist (RWE) groups tried desperately to band together, planning a number of rallies and events in some of the nation’s most urban cities to show support for the extreme right in general and to promote racist, anti-immigration sentiment ...
Blog
How You Thought You Support the Animals and You Ended Up Funding White Supremacists
December 11, 2019
In cooperation with French media Le Monde (in English here), the EU DisinfoLab helped expose a French white supremacist network that uses deceptive Facebook pages to attract visitors on their website to generate revenue from online advertisements, and sell racist products as a means to support their activities. Key takeaways from our study We uncovered ...
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Innocent Users Have the Most to Lose in the Rush to Address Extremist Speech Online
October 31, 2019
By Jillian C. York and Eliot Harmon Internet Companies Must Adopt Consistent Rules and Transparent Moderation Practices Big online platforms tend to brag about their ability to filter out violent and extremist content at scale, but those same platforms refuse to provide even basic information about the substance of those removals. How do these platforms ...
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An Overview of Radical Right-focused Presentations at #TASMConf 2019
July 10, 2019
By Pamela Ligouri Bunker and Robert J. Bunker The 2019 Terrorism and Social Media (TASM) Conference took place on 25 and 26 June 2019 at Swansea University Bay Campus, Wales, United Kingdom. The conference was organised by Swansea University’s Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law and its Cyber Threats Research Centre (CYTREC), with the support ...
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The Challenge of Drawing a Line between Objectionable Material and Freedom of Expression Online
June 26, 2019
By Philippa Smith When it comes to debates about free speech that needs to be protected and hate speech that needs to be legislated, the idiom of “drawing the line” is constantly referenced by politicians, journalists and academics. It has surfaced again as New Zealanders struggle to comprehend the abhorrence of the Christchurch terror attack and ...
Blog
Social media creates a spectacle society that makes it easier for terrorists to achieve notoriety
May 1, 2019
By Stuart M Bender The shocking mass-shooting in Christchurch on 15 March was notable for using livestreaming video technology to broadcast horrific first-person footage of the shooting on social media. The perpetrator of this week’s attack on a California synagogue also allegedly planned to livestream the latter, except this did not materialise The use of social media technology ...
Blog
Who Supports Dissident Irish Republicanism? A  Snapshot of Sympathisers on Facebook in 2015
April 25, 2019
By Ross Frenett Introduction The murder of Lyra McKee on Good Friday has shone a spotlight on an often under-reported and under-analysed form of violent extremism, violent dissident republicanism (VDR).  McKee’s murder was not an aberration; in the past number of years, VDR groups have killed two soldiers, two Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) ...