Blog
Meet BreadTube, the YouTube Activists Trying to Beat the Far-right at Their Own Game
March 31, 2021
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 ...
News
VOX-Pol in the News
January 25, 2021
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, ...
Blog
Big Tech’s Rejection of Parler Shuts down a Site Favored by Trump Supporters – and Used by Participants in the US Capitol Insurrection
January 20, 2021
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 ...
Blog
The Christchurch Terror Attack: A Case of Online Radicalisation?
December 16, 2020
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. ...
Blog
Blind Networks in the Extreme-Right
October 28, 2020
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 ...
Blog
Social Media Extremism Can Also Be Asymptomatic: Policy Recommendations
October 21, 2020
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 ...
Blog
The Effects of Censoring the Far-Right Online
July 15, 2020
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 ...
Blog
Intra-EU Disinformation: the French Website Managed by a Polish Far-Right Network
June 10, 2020
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 ...
Blog
How Extreme is the European Far-Right: A Twitter Analysis
May 20, 2020
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 ...
Blog
Wie Extrem ist die Rechte in Europa: eine Twitter-Analyse
May 20, 2020
Read in English Dieser Blogeintrag enthält einen Abschnitt aus dem vollständigen Bericht, verfügbar in englischer und deutscher Sprache [Ed.]. Von Reem Ahmed und Daniela Pisoiu Insgesamt 381.912 Tweets wurden über die Twitter-API (Programmierschnittstelle) von 175 EU-weiten Accounts gesammelt, die als rechtsextremistisch  identifiziert wurden (insbesondere Accounts mit offen neo-nazistischen und White Supremacist Themen). Die Tweets wurden ...