Gabriel Weimann

• PhD
• University of Haifa

The terms Deep Web, Deep Net, Invisible Web, or Dark Web refer to the content on the World Wide Web that is not indexed by standard search engines. One can describe the Internet as composed of layers: the “upper” layer, or the Surface Web, can easily be accessed by regular searches. However, “deeper” layers, the content of the Deep Web, have not be...

Bereits seit den 1990er Jahren gebrauchen TerroristInnen das Internet für ihre Zwecke, das ihnen ganz neue Möglichkeiten für Propaganda, Rekrutierung, Radikalisierung, Finanzierung und Planung eröffnet hat. Statt auf eigene Webseiten setzen TerroristInnen heute zunehmend und gezielt auf die Neuen Medien. Diese bieten eine hervorragende kostenlose I...

A consideration of terrorism as communication necessarily draws attention to the development of counter narratives as a strategy for interrupting the process by which individuals become radicalised towards violent extremism. As the Internet has become a critical medium for psychological warfare by terrorists, some attempts have been made to challen...

It is hard to imagine a more challenging arena for communication research than that presented by new media and their impact on our society. We have witnessed the fastest evolution in communication technology in human history and, along with it, the evolution of communication conceptions and theories used to assess its impact. More than a decade has...

Lone-wolf terrorism has been regarded as a serious threat to public safety in recent years. Moreover, the phenomenon appears to be increasing at an alarming rate. However, the gap between the perceived threat of lone-wolf terrorism, on the one hand, and the almost exclusive scholarly focus on group-based terrorism, on the other hand, indicates the...

In 1989, the term fatwa became globally known, following Ayatollah Khomeini’s death-fatwa issued on Salman Rushdie for his novel, Satanic Verses. Today, the Internet has become a useful platform for posting of fatwas and interpretations of fatwas. The present article highlights the use of jihadist fatwas, and especially online fatwas, as a major in...

The current age of technology, mass communication, and globalization makes networks analysis an especially useful tool for understanding cell-based terrorism. Some concepts from traditional networks analysis may be especially relevant. The Strength of Weak Ties hypothesis (SWT) is particularly promising and will be used here to demonstrate the usab...

This book examines reason and unreason in the legal and political responses to terrorism.

Given the growth of Internet research in recent years, it is rather surprising that research of online terrorism and countermeasures has been lacking theoretical and conceptual frameworks. The present study suggests applying the concepts and models taken from e-marketing to the study of terrorist websites. This work proves that when Hamas builds an...

Since the introduction of the opinion leadership conceptualization, both practitioners and academics have been keenly interested in its applicability in modern society. Numerous studies have been conducted to identify potential opinion leaders, learn of the characteristics distinguishing them from their ‘followers,’ and understand how they exert th...

The growing presence of modern terrorism on the Internet is at the nexus of two key trends: the democratization of communications driven by user-generated content on the Internet; and the growing awareness of modern terrorists of the potential of the Internet for their purposes. How best can the terrorists’ use and abuse of the Internet be countere...

Modern terrorists became aware of the new opportunities for exerting mass psychological impact using the latest means of mass communications. Academic observers remarked increasingly on the theater-like nature of terrorist operations. According to this notion, modern terrorism can be understood in terms of the production requirements of theatrical...

The growing use and manipulation of modern communications by terrorist organizations have led communication and terrorism scholars to reconceptualize modern terrorism within the framework of symbolic communication theory. Some applied the theater-of-terror metaphor to examine modern terrorism as an attempt to communicate messages through the use of...

Sparse literature exists on the topic of intimacy appeals in political advertising, so in this study Horton and Wohl's para-social theory was applied to explain the “relationship” in Israel between television performers (politicians) and spectators (voters) through the intimacy concept. Altogether, 442 political ads from two Israeli election campai...

While the Web has become a worldwide platform for communication, terrorists share their ideology and communicate with members on the “Dark Web”—the reverse side of the Web used by terrorists. Currently, the problems of information overload and difficulty to obtain a comprehensive picture of terrorist activities hinder effective and efficient analys...

This study explores the dynamics of social concern over reality shows. Couched in the theory of the influence of presumed influence, it is argued that the degree of concern over the effects of media mediates between beliefs in media power and people's responses to such beliefs. Survey data show that perceived influence is distinct from concern over...

Several studies have revealed the growing popularity of astrology columns, which has brought astrology to a mass level never in its long history enjoyed before. The widespread exposure of astrology columns in newspapers and magazines is studied in the present research, according to the “uses and gratifications” approach originally developed by mass...

Terrorists are using the Internet for various purposes. Most of the attempts to monitor and study terrorist presence on the Net focused on the practical and communicative uses of this channel by modern terrorists. Yet, not much attention has been paid to the use of the Net as a medium for terrorist debates and disputes. This descriptive article pre...

The use of emotions in political campaigns is known and well documented. From its earliest days in the Roman Empire or later in Crusader times to its extensive use by the Nazi regime, political propaganda attempted to seduce and convince, attract and influence targeted publics by appealing to their emotions. Appeals to fear, hope, pride, anger, and...

This study investigates the impact of ethnic origin on the attribution of criminal offenses to faces seen in portrait photographs. The underlying hypothesis is that ethnic stereotypes are a result of the way people perceive themselves and other groups (that is, the relation of in-groups to outgroups) and that ethnic stereotypes directly affect a pe...

Television has been a single-station medium in Israel since 1968. However, the 1990s brought a dramatic change: the introduction of cable television and the dramatic transition to a multichannel system. Using a before-after research design, the present study focuses on the short-term effects of the transition. Comparing cabled samples with matched...

Terrorists fight their wars in cyberspace as well as on the ground. However, while politicians and the media have hotly debated the dangers that cyberterrorism poses to the Internet, surprisingly little is known about the threat posed by terrorists' use of the Internet. Today, as this report makes plain, terrorist organizations and their supporters...

This article reports the findings of the multistage agenda-setting process of four Israeli elections. In the first stage, agenda building, it is demonstrated that there is a close association between real-world indicators and media agenda. In the second stage, agenda setting, it was found that the level of television coverage of issues influences t...

The Internet which has enabled global businesses to flourish has be- come the very same channel for mushrooming 'terrorist news networks.' Ter- rorist organizations and their sympathizers have found a cost-effective resource to advance their courses by posting high-impact Websites with short shelf-lives. Because of their evanescent nature, terroris...

Cancer, being a terminal and often incurable disease, is a source of fear and concern for human beings. One of the most important sources of medical information in general, and cancer specifically, is the mass media. The media can shape beliefs regarding health and influence people's decision-making. The main hypothesis guiding this study, based on...

Cyberterrorism conjures up images of vicious terrorists unleashing catastrophic attacks against computer networks, wreaking havoc, and paralyzing nations. This is a frightening scenario, but how likely is it to occur? Could terrorists cripple critical military, financial, and service computer systems? This article charts the rise of cyberangst and...

6095 Background: Cancer, being a terminal and often incurable disease, is a source of fear and concern for people. One of the most important sources for medical information in general, and cancer specifically, is the mass media. The media can shape beliefs regarding health and influence people's decision making. The main hypothesis guiding this stu...

The nature of the Internet--the ease of access, the chaotic structure, the anonymity, and the international character--all furnish terrorist organizations with an easy and effective arena for action. The present research focuses on the use of the Internet by modern terrorist organizations and attempts to describe the uses terrorist organizations ma...

This study aims to explore the effects of TV viewing on the cultivation of fear and interpersonal trust among Israeli youth, and to make methodological and theoretical contributions to the study of cultivation. Besides testing cultivation theory using an Israeli sample, the present study focuses on the effects of different genres on attitudes in di...

Do the listening styles preferred by young adults in Germany, Israel, and the USA differ significantly? In order to address this question, college students in all three countries completed versions of the Listening Styles Profile (LSP; Watson et al. 1995) presented in their native languages. Factor analysis revealed four predominant constructs unde...

This study, conducted in Israel, compares suicide motives as reported in the press with the official statistics. The analysis is based on two sets of data: the first includes all suicides (n = 4164) recorded from 1972-1988 by Israel's Ministry of Health, and the other contains all press reports n = 1885) relating to suicide over the same period in...

This study examines four models of a two-step flow of the agenda-setting process, highlighting the role played by certain individuals (early recognizers) in mediating between the public and the media. The data sets contained coding of news items on the major German television networks from 1990 to 1993 and 28 surveys conducted in West and East Germ...

The present study provides evidence of the many facets of a rapid change in media environment. Due to the unique circumstances of introducing cable television in Israel, the short‐term effects of the new medium could be monitored and measured. Using a before‐after research design, comparing cabled samples with matched samples unreached yet by cable...

Presents a content analysis of suicide stories in the Israeli Press (1955-90) and measures of real suicide events to highlight the selective, distorted, and reconstructed nature of reporting suicide. Argues that such reporting may account for at least some of the contradictory findings of studies on the impact of publicized suicide stories on imita...

The present study integrates two concepts: the notion of opinion leadership, as conceptualized and measured by the Strength of Personality (SP) scale, and the agenda-setting process. Thus, we suggest and test a two-step flow model in which certain individuals, the influentials, identify emerging issues in the mass media and then diffuse these issue...

This article attempts to construct and test a typology of television viewing based on a combination of various measures of the amount of watching of various TV genres. Unlike earlier typologies, ours relies on several dimensions of content, time and devotion, yielding a categorization of viewers according to the pattern of their TV consumption. The...

To study different conceptualizations of TV loyalty, we analyzed two weeks of data from a representative panel of 2,365 British viewers. Correlational analyses reveal that television viewing is remarkably consistent over time in terms of selected channels, preferred program types, and preferred programs within program types. At least for the Britis...

The emergence of media-oriented terrorism has led scholars of modern terrorism to reconceptualize this phenomenon within the framework of symbolic communication theory. This study focuses on the newsworthiness of international terrorism. It relates the concept of deviance as a predictor of newsworthiness to the specific attributes of terrorist even...

The concept of opinion leadership has been related to a lingering theoretical and methodological debate. The present study examines a new measure to identify opinion leaders (the Strength of Personality Scale) developed by the Allensbach Survey Center in Germany. The results of applying this measure in Germany and Israel allowed the testing of its...

This article examines the part played by the mass media in the diffusion of international terrorism. It applies time-series analysis to a database containing the Rand Corporation Chronology of International Terrorism, and measures of media coverage devoted to each terrorist incident on US television networks and nine newspapers from various countri...

The generous coverage of pre-election polls in the media has stimulated a debate on the effects of publicized polls on voters. Data for this study come from a content analysis of all press reports on polls during six pre-election campaigns in Israel (1969–88). The findings highlight the impressive increase of poll reports both by space and by promi...

The emergence of media-oriented terrorism led several scholars of modern terrorism to reconceptualize the phenomenon of terror within the framework of symbolic communication theory. However, the success of media-minded terrorists has been studied mainly by measures of amount of coverage given to terrorist acts and not by examining the impact of thi...

The growing body of research on the subject of women and the media has only recently begun to consider the treatment of female criminality. The present study examines the `chivalry hypothesis' as related to media portrayals of female criminality. The data were obtained from a systematic content analysis of 724 press reports of crimes which appeared...

The study examines the predictability of international terrorism in terms of the existence of trends, seasonality, and periodicity of terrorist events. The data base used was the RAND Corporation's Chronology of International Terrorism. It contains the attributes of every case of international terrorism from 1968 to 1986 (n = 5,589). The authors ap...

The authors examined, through content analysis, some criticisms that have been levelled at the press in its coverage of crime. The propositions examined included the accusations that newspapers are preoccupied with violence and “street” crime, that they focus on the bizarre, are superficial in their reporting of crime, misinform the public about th...

This study examined the attributions of responsibility contained in factual accounts of crime in a number of Canadian daily newspapers. The focus was upon the relative amount of coverage accorded crime suspects and victims, as well as upon the presence or absence of references to the victim's contribution to the offense. Also, examined were the eff...

Media‐oriented terrorism has stirred growing interest in the communication strategy of modern terrorism and in the quantity, forms, and consequences of media coverage of terrorist events. One limitation of previous analyses is the lack of a theoretical framework to pinpoint the uniqueness of terrorism as media drama, and the commonalities with othe...

In summer 1985, a TWA plane was hijacked by Shiite terrorists to Beirut creating what turned to be one of the most impressive spectacles of the mass‐mediated “theater of terror.” After the event the American media were blamed for fanning the crisis atmosphere, giving the terrorists the publicity they craved, abetting the terrorists by reporting U.S...

The present study examines the impact of national and ethnic divisions on misidentification. In that respect this study is the first of its kind. The study of misidentification on the national level involves a comparison of Israeli and Canadian samples, while the cross-ethnic aspect of the study relies on a comparison of three ethnic groups within...

Current social images and perceptions are reflected, cultivated, and reinforced by the mass media (Katz 1981). The past decade has witnessed a growing interest in mass media images of women. The large body of research on the portrayal of women in the media has focused on a number of issues. Some have examined the relationships between media images...

The present study set out to test the popular stereotype of male communicative dominance in the context of dealing with bureaucracy. The study examined the responses of male and female officials of various bureaucratic organizations to different persuasive appeals activated by male and female clients. Log-linear analysis was used to reveal the rela...

The achievement of terrorism in gaining generous, worldwide media coverage has led to a new mode of terrorism referred to as the “theater of terror"—media‐oriented terrorism. Studies of public opinion and terrorism have revealed that the public is well aware of this trend, blaming vast media coverage as a major cause of terrorism. But the “theater...

The present study sets out to uncover young Israelis' perceptions of the American reality using the postulates and methodology of the cultivation analysis approach to mass communication. The comparison of the perceptions of "light" and "heavy" T.V. viewers with measures of the actual reality reveals that heavy viewers demonstrate a strong and consi...

The “Strength of Weak Ties” theory is used to analyze the flow of information and influence in the network of conversational ties in a kibbutz community.The flow of six information items and two decision-making items was measured by indicators of communicative efficiency — speed, accuracy and credibility. The strength of ties activated and the dire...

The present study applies the small world method to examine cross-ethnic acquaintance networks in Israeli society. The experimental design consisted of 144 starting persons who were presented with either an Oriental or Ashkenazi target person, thus yielding four types of ethnic combinations: (1) Ashkenazi to Ashkenazi; (2) Ashkenazi to Oriental; (3...

Reports that coverage of preelection polls by the Israeli press has increased markedly since 1948, as has media sponsorship of them. (FL)

This study applies cross-level network analysis to modify the Two-Step Model of communication flow, focusing on marginally positioned individuals and pointing out the "bridging function" of marginals in the flow of information between groups. The hypotheses examined derive from the concepts of the Balance Theory, applied to network analysis, sugges...

This article reports findings from an experiment measuring the effectiveness of different persuasive appeals-normative, altruistic, reciprocal positive, and reciprocal negative-when dealing with different types of bureaucratic organizations. Log-linear analysis is used to compare the possible combinations of relations of organization types and pers...

Thes-f interaction between the localized Gd moments and the conduction electrons in yttrium leads to an exchange narrowing of the fine structure due to the hexagonal crystalline field. The axial spin Hamiltonian parameterD, derived from the angular variation of the center of gravity of the observed resonance line, equals—140 Gauss. Thes-f interacti...

The g-shift and the linewidths in the EPR of gadolinium in GdxY1−xAg have been studied as a function of temperature and concentration. For x > 0.002 a bottleneck in the relaxation of the conduction electrons to the lattice has been observed. The results can be described by Hasegawa's equations; the dynamic effect, predicted in these formulas could...

Abstract A media-savvy organization, Hezbollah operates a radio station (Al-Nur) and a television station (Al-Manar) and was among,the first terrorist organizations to establish and operate an extensive network,of linked websites. Hezbollah treats the Internet as an extension of its propaganda,apparatus; together with its publications and televisio...

Presious ESR investigations on Gd-doped YAg were extended to higher Gd ; concentrations. It is shown that increasing Gd concentration leads to a sign ; reversal for the g-shift accompanied by a decreasing line width. The ; experimental data are explained by a two-band model that allows for a relaxation ; of the Gd spin to selectrons as well as to d...

Microfilm. Title on added t.p.: Conversation networks as communication networks. Thesis (Ph. D.) --ha-Universiṭah ha-ʻIvrit, 1980.

Nuklearmedizinische Methoden finden im pulmonologischen Bereich eine zunehmende Verbreitung, da sie in nahezu idealer Weise sowohl zu integralen wie auch regionalen Lungenfunktionsmessungen benutzt werden können. Intravenös injizierte radioaktiv-markierte Albuminpartikel mit einem Durchmesser etwas größer als der von Lungencapillaren passieren die...

Die i.v. Injektion einer Suspension radioaktiv markierter Partikel bestimmter Größe, die in den Lungencapillaren fixiert werden, erlaubt eine szintigraphische Darstellung der Durchblutung der Lungencapillaren zum Zeitpunkt der Applikation (Übersicht: Taplin et al., 1964). Mit dieser Methode können Informationen über Durchblutungsverhältnisse im kle...