0608, 2019

Reconciling Ethics and Policy Impact

By Dounia Mahlouly|August 6, 2019|Extreme speech, Media and Syrian conflict, Research|0 comments

In recent years, debates on global and national security have to a large extent relied on reviving the political terminology introduced by the post-9/11 War on Terror. Discourses underpinning the American-led intervention in the Syrian Civil War and media coverage of the 2015-2017 terrorist attacks in Europe have further established the normative, limiting and often-biased language of ‘Counter-terrorism’. Along with general concerns over misinformation, the threat of ‘terrorist’ propaganda is

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1507, 2019

Global Digital Cultures and Extreme Speech

By Matti Pohjonen|July 15, 2019|Digital cultures, Extreme speech, Research|0 comments

I am glad to announce the publication of a Special Issue on Global Digital Cultures and Extreme Speech published in the International Journal of Communication.  This is the outcome of a five-year collaboration with colleagues across the world committed to advancing a more comparative perspective to ongoing debates on online hate speech and violent online political extremism — and most notably collaboration with Professor Sahana Udupa at the Digital Dignity Project, at LMU

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0407, 2019

Should robots control what we read?

By Matti Pohjonen|July 4, 2019|AI, Digital cultures, Extreme speech, India, Research, Social media|0 comments

For somebody who has been following digital politics globally for more than a decade now, it is sometimes uncanny how hateful, violent and misleading communication – or at least the public and political controversies and moral panics around them – now dominates the global political landscape. Digital media, it seems, is imagined in mostly terms of the dangers it poses: violent extremist propaganda run amok; democratic processes corrupted by disinformation

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0905, 2019

Social media and political polarisation

By Matti Pohjonen|May 9, 2019|Digital cultures, Extreme speech, Research|0 comments

Recent attacks in Christchurch and Sri Lanka have added fuel to the debate about how to resolve what has been described as one of the most intractable problems of the contemporary world – the spread of hate/hateful speech online. However, as some of our recent research  shows, what perhaps is a more intractable  (and often overlooked) problem than merely removing aggressive or hateful comments from social media is the challenge of

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