By Laurence Bindner, Raphael Gluck This article was originally published in French on Ultima Ratio. Since partly going underground in the deep-web, ISIS exerts continuous pressure to make its propaganda surface on the public web. Adapting constantly to ever more active censorship, ISIS uses the various web platforms in an opportunistic and agile way. Therefore,…
By Lorand Bodo The UK think-tank Policy Exchange recently published a new report on the struggle against online jihadist extremism, or what its authors call “the New Netwar”. The report argues that we are currently struggling to find appropriate ways to combat online jihadist extremism and therefore losing the war online against the so-called ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS).…
By Maura Conway and Suraj Lakhani This post is based on findings contained in the VOX-Pol report Disrupting Daesh: Measuring Takedown of Online Terrorist Material and its Impacts published on 15 August 2017. Alongside the fierce battles that have been raging of late in key strongholds of so-called Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq, intense battles against…
Maura Conway – Disrupting Daesh: Measuring Takedown of Online Terrorist Material & Its Impacts VOX-Pol Coordinator, Maura Conway, discusses the findings of VOX-Pol’s August 2017 report ‘Disrupting Daesh: Measuring Takedown of Online Terrorist Material and Its Impacts.’ Twitter ‘becoming less effective’ as platform for Islamic State Twitter is becoming less effective as a platform for…
In one 24-hour period, 65% of Twitter accounts tweeting out-links to IS propaganda were suspended within 17 hours Focus of online disruption on IS allows other jihadi groups to outpace them on social media VOX-Pol researchers from Dublin City University, together with colleagues from the University of Sussex, have found that the social media platform,…
By Glenda Cooper Some of the most powerful stories about the atrocity in recent Manchester have been told online: whether pictures of the missing, the videos taken in the aftermath or the hashtags such as #roomformanchester or #acityunited showing the city’s resilience. But there are those who have also felt under pressure from journalists. Twitter…
On 15 May 2017 VOX-Pol’s Coordinator, DCU’s Prof. Maura Conway, gave a keynote address at Dublin’s Institute of International and European Affairs (IIEA), “Ireland’s leading think tank on European and International affairs.” In her address, Prof. Conway detailed the development of IS’s online strategy from 2014 to the present, with a particular focus on online-offline…
Are Twitter bots driving the success of far right candidates? While many are still trying to make sense of the election of Donald Trump and the surge in popularity of Marine Le Pen, evidence suggests that public perceptions of these candidates are being manipulated by far right social media activists. Social media can be a…
On 15-16 March, VOX-Pol Programme Manager, Lisa McInerney, will participate in the EU’s Radicalisation Awareness Network’s (RAN) Civil Society Empowerment Programme’s kick-off workshop. The Civil Society Empowerment Programme (CSEP) is an initiative produced by the European Commission with the support of partners in the Internet industry; Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft. CSEP brings together internet…
By Alice E. Marwick This post is part II of the series. Please click here to read part I. Free Speech and a Free Internet In 1997, the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Reno v. ACLU case that internet speech deserved the same free speech protections as spoken or written speech. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in the majority…
