Women, Girls and Islamist Extremism

This new toolkit will help practitioners engage more confidently with women and girls affiliated with Islamist extremism and provide guidance for broader community groups involved in safeguarding at-risk women and girls in Europe. Building on a series of interviews with intervention providers, the new toolkit sheds light on some of the reasons why British women became affiliated with ISIS. The interviews have informed a new practical toolkit which includes recommendations, case studies and tools.

‘The Baghdadi Net’: How A Network of ISIL-Supporting Accounts Spread Across Twitter

The Management of Terrorist Content: How Al Qaeda Texts Continue to Evade Facebook and YouTube Detection

This briefing paper highlights Al Qaeda content available on YouTube and Facebook and exposes the continued persistence of gaps in the companies’ ability to identify and remove content, which they have committed to doing.

A joint statement on the Online Harms White Paper and the direction of regulation in the UK

ISD submitted expert advice to the consultation on the UK Government’s Online Harms White Paper, which lays out the stated design for regulation of technology companies in the UK. ISD worked with leading UK research and civil society organisations including Carnegie UK, Demos, Doteveryone, the Fawcett Society and the Jo Cox Foundation to produce a joint statement on the Online Harms White Paper and the direction of regulation in the UK.

‘The Great Replacement’: The Violent Consequences of Mainstreamed Extremism

This report presents the findings of a project that investigated the prevalence, scale and nature of the ideologies and narratives that motivated the attack which left 51 dead and injured 50 more during Friday prayers at the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Disrupted: Evidence of Widespread Digital Disruption of the 2019 European Elections

This briefing brings together the observations of a coalition of organisation who monitored the 2019 European Parliamentary Elections to identify distortion, disruption or interference campaigns and the technology companies response to them. You can read more about ISD's work monitoring the 2019 EU Elections in our interim report, published 24th May 2019.

Hate Speech and Radicalisation Online: The OCCI Research Report

The research series Hate Speech and Radicalisation on the Internet provides interdisciplinary insights into the current developments of extremist activities on the internet. With the aid of expert contributions from all over Germany, the psychological, political, anthropological and technological aspects of online hate speech and radicalisation will be considered and recommendations will be made for political leaders, social media platforms as well as NGOs and activists.

‘Innovation fund to counter hate and extremism in the UK’, impact report

The rise of coordinated attacks on the foundations of liberal democracy continue unabated across Europe. In the United Kingdom, fringe groups and ideologues continue to challenge the government and the tech sector as they promote xenophobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and extremism. By doing so, they continue to inflame community tensions and create division and polarisation between citizens.

Interim Briefing: Propaganda and Digital Campaigning in the EU Elections

ISD uncovered a range of digital influence campaigns targeting the European Parliamentary elections through a mix of social media mapping, undercover online reporting and media monitoring. This interim briefing paper addresses who is behind these malign influence operations and analyses the techniques they use. It also assesses the record of the tech companies in addressing these threats to electoral integrity.

Building Digital Citizenship in France: Lessons from the Sens Critique project

The advent of new communication technologies and their ubiquity has many benefits for information sharing at a global level. However, these new technologies have also created new challenges which our societies are now faced with: the spread of disinformation, manipulation and online hate. This report assesses the Sens Critique pilot programme which took place in Paris last year.