Social Media

By Suzanne Mos The Internet is a good place to get a sense of what topics certain groups or movements deem important. In this Blog post, I present the findings of comparative mixed methods research addressing the question ‘How does the use of Twitter by far-right political parties differ from right-wing extremist movements in terms ...

By Tom Ascott Everyone has seen a meme, whether they know it or not. They’re everywhere on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The most popular ones make it off the Internet and show up in newspapers, television shows or films. You’ve almost certainly seen Pepe the Frog, and if you haven’t seen the classic ‘Woman yelling ...

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 ...

By Moign Khawaja It has been almost two years since the Islamic State, also known as IS or ISIS, lost its final stronghold in eastern Syria and four months since its leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi was killed in a US military raid. Have these two game-changing events led to the demise of the group ...

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 ...

By Neil Shortland and Allyssa McCabe In the weeks following two mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, police forces across the United States made more than 20 arrests based on threats made on social media. Police in Florida, for example, arrested an alleged white supremacist who, police said, threatened a shooting at a ...

Deplatforming terrorists from messaging apps may damage existing networks, but those who remain often double down in their beliefs. By Amarnath Amarasingam Earlier this week, a fellow terrorism researcher and friend sent me a text which stated: “TamTam is amazing. I missed all the early ISIS stuff on Telegram. Now I feel like I was ...

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 ...

By Reem Ahmed and Daniela Pisoiu Social media is attractive to the far right in the same way as it is to other extremist groups. It offers a more direct, personal communication channel with potential audiences (Ernst et al. 2017: 1357). Moreover, in the absence of traditional media ‘gatekeepers’, the far right are able to ...

By Wasim Ahmed This post builds upon the 2015, and 2017 editions of this post, captures key trends and events which are shaping social media research for social scientists and provides a collection of research methods and tools for the analysis of social media data. Since the 2017 edition of this blog post, I have ...