This blog post is a follow-up to last week’s post on Twitter activity following the terrorist attack that took place in Nice, France, on 14 July, 2016 and associated real-world events during the ensuing week. It is part of a larger project exploring hashtag activism in CVE. The first posts traced the online reaction to…
ISIS
This blog post and a follow-up next week analyse Twitter activity following the terrorist attack that took place in Nice, France on 14 July, 2016 and associated real-world events during the ensuing week. It is part of a larger project exploring hashtag activism in CVE. This first posts traces the online reaction to developments during…
Rather than analyzing the so-called ‘Islamic States’’ use of (social) media, in this post Dr. Matti Pohjonen, VOX-Pol Research Fellow 2016, explores if parallels can be drawn between it and a topic he’s more familiar with: far right anti-Islamic hate speech. Following the Paris, Brussels, and other attacks, newspaper commentaries have routinely warned about the…
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…
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…