This Blog post is the third—the first is HERE and the second HERE—in a four-part series of article summaries from the EU H2020-funded BRaVE project’s First Monday Special Issue exploring societal resilience to online polarization and extremism. Read the full article HERE [Ed.]. By Amy-Louise Watkin and Maura Conway Discussions already underway amongst not just…
YouTube
By Anne Speckhard, Maha Ghazi and Molly Ellenberg YouTube, first online in 2005, was one of the earliest social media platforms used by terrorist organizations to spread their propaganda. Although many such groups have used YouTube and other online platforms for malicious purposes, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS] has become notorious over the…
By Nathalie Collins New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern has called for “ethical algorithms” to help stop online radicalisation. She made her call at the second summit of the “Christchurch Call” for action to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online. The first Christchurch Call summit was convened by Ardern and French president Emmanuel Macron…
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…
By Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández and Joanne Gray People watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Over the past few years, the video sharing platform has come under fire for its role in spreading and amplifyingextreme views. YouTube’s video recommendation system, in particular, has been criticised for radicalising young people and steering viewers…
Incels are a danger to society and to themselves. Technology has made the problem worse, but it can also help fix it. Involuntary celibates, or incels, believe that a socio-genetic conspiracy theory is preventing them from having sexual relationships with women. Denied their right to sex because society has deemed them unworthy, some of their…
By Linda Schlegel The rise of social media usage as an everyday activity for millions of citizens has been accompanied by a discussion about the dangers of this development. Echo chambers or “filter bubbles” are often mentioned in this regard.[1] Both concepts refer to the possibility that social media users only engage with content that…
VOX-Pol is pleased to make the article Down the (White) Rabbit Hole: The Extreme Right and Online Recommender Systems, published in 2014 in the Journal Social Science Computer Review open access. The research is a multidisciplinary collaboration between University College Dublin School of Computer Science & Informatics and Dublin City University School of Law &…
By Raheel Nawaz The UK government – with considerable pomp and ceremony – recently unveiled a new online tool for detection and removal of jihadi videos boasting a high success rate. It has been claimed by the Home Office that the machine learning tool, which the government developed with ASI Data Science, can identify 94%…
By Adam G. Klein As the National Rifle Association, the most influential gun rights advocacy group in the U.S., comes under pressure from victims’ groups and gun control advocates, internet companies like Amazon, Apple and YouTube are finding themselves uncomfortably close to the center of the controversy. These are among the companies that currently stream the…
