Extremist Groups

In 2013, The SecDev Group undertook a 10-month Kanishka-funded project that set out, in part,  to explore methodologies and technologies for open source social media (OSSM) research and their potential utility for detecting weak signals of radicalization towards violent extremism online.

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This 2013 study profiles the ideologies, messages, and uses of social media among three types of extremist movements in Sweden: right-wing groups, left-wing “autonomist” groups, and Islamist extremist groups.

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This research note summarizes experimental research conducted by The SecDev Group in 2013, as part of a Public Safety Canada, Kanishka-funded project looking at social media analytics and the prevention of violent extremism.

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This experiment used the Twitter profile of a U.K. national, verified to be an active foreign fighter (FF) in the Syrian civil war, as the seed for constructing a network topology based on social media interactions.

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This summary captures the main findings of a longitudinal content analysis of a known foreign fighter’s (FF) public social media activity for signs of radicalization toward violent extremism.

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This netnographic study examines al-Shabaab’s Western media strategy. The authors focus their study on the group’s recruitment of Western Muslims through the analysis of primary sources, interviews in East Africa and a quantitative analysis of the group’s Twitter outputs.

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This short article is the Research Brief for the full report: “Lights, Camera, Jihad: Al-Shabaab’s Western Media Strategy”, which is also available in this Portal.

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