At the end of April, VOX-Pol’s Coordinator, Prof. Maura Conway, exchanged a series of emails with Brazilian magazine Imprensa’s Gabriela Ferigato for a feature piece she was writing on the so-called ‘Islamic State’s’ online activity. The feature appeared recently and is available to read HERE for Portuguese speakers. A lightly edited version of the original…
ISIS
By Moign Khawaja and Sara Dissanayake The Islamic State, previously calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a Sunni jihadist group active in Iraq and Syria. The group has been labeled a terrorist organisation by the UN for committing gross human…
By Sandy Schumann Following the deaths of several African American men at the hands of police last year, the Twitter hashtag #blacklivesmatter enabled people from around the world to discuss race relations in the US. What is less well-known is that this hashtag – among others – was also used by supporters of Islamic State, who aimed to appeal…
My first conversation with Islamic State was about my reporting. I had just shared an article I’d written about the terrorist group recruiting Western fighters on my Twitter when I saw that someone using the Twitter handle Abu Omar had also posted a link to the piece on his own account. His profile photo unabashedly…
By Richard Forno & Anupam Joshi Recently, United States Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work publicly confirmed that the Pentagon’s Cyber Command was “dropping cyberbombs,” taking its ongoing battle against the Islamic State group into the online world. Other American officials, including President Barack Obama, have discussed offensive cyber activities, too. The American public has only glimpsed…
Twitter has become a key social media platform used by non-state actors in Syria to send propaganda to the rest of the world. For the most part Twitter has done a good job of clamping down on ISIS presence on the website. Twitter routinely bans ISIS supporter’s accounts and is quite fast at deleting ISIS propaganda…
By Daniel Falkiner Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate provides detailed answers to a number of pressing questions: What exactly is ISIS? Where did it come from? Who is behind it? How does it function? What are the reasons for its success? Daniel Falkiner welcomes the rich description and analysis and finds Abdel Bari Atwan does an admirable job of explaining the ways Islamic…
By Matteo Vergani We (myself and Ana-Maria Bliuc) just published a brief research-paper in the Italian magazine “Security, Terrorism and Society“. We used the computerized text analysis program LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) to investigate the evolution of the language across the first 11 Issues of Dabiq. Our paper shows ISIS’ increasing concern with…
By Javier Lesaca The so-called Islamic State (ISIS) has emerged in less than two years as one of the major security challenges for the global community. At the same time, this terrorist group has become one of the most important phenomena in digital public communication since the beginning of the century. In fact, the analysis of…
Dr. Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, Head of Research and Information at VOX-Pol partner ICSR, had said more needs to be done on a region/country specific basis as part of the West’s de-radicalisation strategy. Dr. Hitchens made the comments while addressing the fourth annual Sulaimani Forum at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS), Iraq, which took place 16 –…
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