By Inés Bolaños Somoano Old threats, new threats Has the European Union “won” the fight against terrorism? Yes and no. Australia’s Institute for Economic & Peace’s Global Terrorism Index 2020 highlights how global deaths from terrorism have fallen for a fifth consecutive year, but also warns of a new terrorism “wave”: far-right attacks have increased…
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Want to submit a blog post? Click here. By Alexander Mitchell Lee YouTube has gained a reputation for facilitating far-right radicalisation and spreading antisocial ideas. However, in an interesting twist, the same subversive, comedic, satiric and ironic tactics used by far-right internet figures are now being countered by a group of leftwing YouTubers known as “BreadTube”. By making videos…
VOX-Pol expertise has been featured in the news since the storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021. The events, which led to five deaths, sparked a discussion about online deplatforming. VOX-Pol Fellows, such as JM Berger, Bharath Ganesh, Sam Jackson and Maura Conway have been quoted in The New York Times, VOX,…
By Alex Newhouse Early in the morning of Jan. 11, the social media platform Parler went offline after Amazon withdrew the platform’s web hosting services. Parler sued Amazon in response. Amazon’s move followed Google and Apple’s banning the Parler app from their app stores. The tech companies cited the platform’s inability or unwillingness to block calls for and threats of…
By Joe Whittaker & Chamin Herath On 15 March, 2019, a far-right terrorist conducted two consecutive attacks at Mosques in New Zealand’s capital, Christchurch. The attacker killed 51 people who had come for Friday Prayers and injured 40 more. In August of 2020 he was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for his crimes.…
By Ben Lee A potent combination of technology and a fractured extreme-right is producing innovative organisations that are harder to police. In April 2020 two men aged 20 and 22 were arrested after posting racist stickers in public spaces across the city of Sheffield. The stickers featured various slogans critical of the government’s handling of…
By Mark Dechesne At a time when world news headlines are dominated by Covid-19, we must not forget that for the past decade, the nations of Europe have been plagued by another fast-spreading and often deadly epidemic: the circulation of socially corrosive, extremist language via social media. This type of social media communication has helped…
By Ofra Klein Since 2016, censorship of far-right groups and individuals on social media platforms has been the subject of much public discussion. With the implementation of laws to counter hateful speech, such as the German Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) and the EU code of conduct, social media companies are now much more responsible for regulating…
By EU DisinfoLab FranceLibre24.net is a site that presents itself as a “French news website”, hiding both the fact that it was created in Poland in July 2019, and that it’s heavily tied to a controversial Polish far-right media network (Najwyższy Czas! & Wolnosc24). Owners of the website almost exclusively publish French-language content on polarising…
Read in German This blog post presents an edited section from the full report, available in both English and in German [Ed.]. By Reem Ahmed and Daniela Pisoiu A total of 381,912 tweets were collected through the Twitter application programming interface (API) from 175 EU-wide accounts that were identified as right-wing extremist (specifically, accounts with…
