{"title":"Issue Information","authors":"","doi":"10.1002/poi3.205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.205","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46894,"journal":{"name":"Policy and Internet","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1002/poi3.205","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41539777","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Annett Heft, Eva Mayerhöffer, Susanne Reinhardt, C. Knüpfer
{"title":"Beyond Breitbart: Comparing Right‐Wing Digital News Infrastructures in Six Western Democracies","authors":"Annett Heft, Eva Mayerhöffer, Susanne Reinhardt, C. Knüpfer","doi":"10.1002/poi3.219","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.219","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46894,"journal":{"name":"Policy and Internet","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1002/poi3.219","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42916222","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Countering Extremists on Social Media: Challenges for Strategic Communication and Content Moderation","authors":"B. Ganesh, Jonathan Bright","doi":"10.1002/poi3.236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.236","url":null,"abstract":"Extremist exploitation of social media platforms is an important regulatory question for civil society, government, and the private sector. Extremists exploit social media for a range of reasons-from spreading hateful narratives and propaganda to financing, recruitment, and sharing operational information. Policy responses to this question fit under two headings, strategic communication and content moderation. At the center of both of these policy responses is a calculation about how best to limit audience exposure to extremist narratives and maintain the marginality of extremist views, while being conscious of rights to free expression and the appropriateness of restrictions on speech. This special issue on \"Countering Extremists on Social Media: Challenges for Strategic Communication and Content Moderation\" focuses on one form of strategic communication, countering violent extremism. In this editorial we discuss the background and effectiveness of this approach, and introduce five articles which develop multiple strands of research into responses and solutions to extremist exploitation of social media. We conclude by suggesting an agenda for future research on how multistakeholder initiatives to challenge extremist exploitation of social media are conceived, designed, and implemented, and the challenges these initiatives need to surmount.","PeriodicalId":46894,"journal":{"name":"Policy and Internet","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1002/poi3.236","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42298424","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Expressing and Challenging Racist Discourse on Facebook: How Social Media Weaken the “Spiral of Silence” Theory","authors":"I. Chaudhry, A. Gruzd","doi":"10.1002/POI3.197","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/POI3.197","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46894,"journal":{"name":"Policy and Internet","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1002/POI3.197","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44175146","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Countering Violent Extremism Online: The Experiences of Informal Counter Messaging Actors","authors":"B. Lee","doi":"10.1002/POI3.210","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/POI3.210","url":null,"abstract":"The online space is a haven for extremists of all kinds. Although efforts to remove violent and extremist content are increasing, there is a widely accepted need to also contest extremist messages with counter messages designed to undermine and disrupt extremist narratives. While the majority of academic focus has been on large and well‐funded efforts linked to governments, this article considers the experiences of informal actors who are active in contesting extremist messaging but who lack the support of large institutions. Informal actors come without some of the baggage that accompanies formal counter message campaigns, which have been attacked as lacking in credibility and constituting “just more government propaganda.” This has been noted by some of the wider countering violent extremism industry and the appetite for incorporating “real‐world” content in their campaigns seems to be rising. This article fills a gap in our knowledge of the experiences of informal counter messaging actors. Through a series of in‐depth qualitative interviews it demonstrates that, despite the potentially serious risks of incorporating greater levels of informal content, there is an appetite among informal actors to engage with formal campaigns where they can be selective over who they work with and maintain a degree of control.","PeriodicalId":46894,"journal":{"name":"Policy and Internet","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1002/POI3.210","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45347001","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Policy and InternetPub Date : 2020-03-01Epub Date: 2019-09-26DOI: 10.1002/poi3.223
Margeret Hall, Michael Logan, Gina S Ligon, Douglas C Derrick
{"title":"Do Machines Replicate Humans? Toward a Unified Understanding of Radicalizing Content on the Open Social Web.","authors":"Margeret Hall, Michael Logan, Gina S Ligon, Douglas C Derrick","doi":"10.1002/poi3.223","DOIUrl":"10.1002/poi3.223","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The advent of the Internet inadvertently augmented the functioning and success of violent extremist organizations. Terrorist organizations like the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) use the Internet to project their message to a global audience. The majority of research and practice on web-based terrorist propaganda uses human coders to classify content, raising serious concerns such as burnout, mental stress, and reliability of the coded data. More recently, technology platforms and researchers have started to examine the online content using automated classification procedures. However, there are questions about the robustness of automated procedures, given insufficient research comparing and contextualizing the difference between human and machine coding. This article compares output of three text analytics packages with that of human coders on a sample of one hundred nonindexed web pages associated with ISIS. We find that prevalent topics (e.g., holy war) are accurately detected by the three packages whereas nuanced concepts (Lone Wolf attacks) are generally missed. Our findings suggest that naïve approaches of standard applications do not approximate human understanding, and therefore consumption, of radicalizing content. Before radicalizing content can be automatically detected, we need a closer approximation to human understanding.</p>","PeriodicalId":46894,"journal":{"name":"Policy and Internet","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1002/poi3.223","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49266448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Regulating Digital Campaigning: The Need for Precision in Calls for Transparency","authors":"K. Dommett","doi":"10.1002/poi3.234","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.234","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46894,"journal":{"name":"Policy and Internet","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2020-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1002/poi3.234","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44819560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"No Backdoors: Investigating the Dutch Standpoint on Encryption","authors":"J. Veen, S. Boeke","doi":"10.1002/poi3.233","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.233","url":null,"abstract":"The use of end‐to‐end encryption services by terrorists and criminals has led many of the world's security and law enforcement agencies to emphasize the need for exceptional access: a backdoor in encryption. The debate involves governments and private parties, and can be approached through the different prisms of privacy, national security, and economics. This article provides historical background and context on the issue of government access to encryption, before focusing on the Dutch government's position on encryption. In January 2016 the Netherlands was the first country to adopt an official and unambiguous standpoint that ruled out backdoors in encryption. Building on interviews conducted with policymakers in various ministries, the authors elucidate the decision making process and identify key factors that led to the government's position. The impetus provided by Parliament, the role of the NGO Bits of Freedom, and an approach that transcended sectoral interests all contributed. While the unique political context and culture of the Netherlands complicates the application of lessons identified to other countries, the case study does illustrate how a multistakeholder process can lead to a clear standpoint of ruling out backdoors in encryption.","PeriodicalId":46894,"journal":{"name":"Policy and Internet","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2020-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1002/poi3.233","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41784259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}