Using social media to research terrorism and extremism

Ashton Kingdon and Emma Ylitalo-James

Chapter 9 in A Research Agenda for Terrorism Studies, 2023, pp 131-143 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Social media is one of humankinds most liberating innovations, yet has become a virtual forecourt for extremists who seek to radicalise, recruit, and disseminate propaganda, effectively transforming this technology into a vessel for hatred and violence. Social media research has a rich repertoire of methods through which to capture data to aid researchers in their understanding of extremist and terrorist activity. This chapter outlines the methodological approaches of interviews, Social Network Analysis, and Open Source Intelligence, and details the affordances and limitations of each. The chapter concludes by arguing that social media both necessitates and requires methodological innovation, specifically in relation to adapting traditional methods and developing new ones specifically tailored to examining extremism in the virtual environment. Social media is in many ways modern society’s Gutenberg press, and research methods need to be technologically and ethically compatible if they are to aid the fight against extremism online.

Keywords: Law - Academic; Politics and Public Policy Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781789909104/9781789909104.00015.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:19368_9

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().