Stuart Macdonald

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• BA (Cantab) PhD (Soton)
• Professor at Swansea University

Cooperation between law enforcement and tech companies is widely regarded as necessary to tackle online terrorist content. Both sectors have publicly stated their commitment to working together, and there have been examples of mutual cooperation. Yet there are also impediments to such collaboration, including different cultures and operating practi...

As efforts to identify and remove online terrorist and violent extremist content have intensified, concern has also grown about so-called lawful but awful content. Various options have been touted for reducing the visibility of this borderline content, including removing it from search and recommendation algorithms, downranking it and redirecting t...

The focus of this report is the use of automated content-based tools – in particular those that use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning – to detect terrorist content online. In broad terms, such tools follow either a matching-based or a classification-based approach. Matching-based approaches rely on a technique known as hashing. The...

It is well established that jihadist groups and their supporters post URLs on online platforms to outlink to items of propaganda stored on other platforms. Industry initiatives – such as the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism’s inclusion of URLs in its hash-sharing database, and Tech Against Terrorism’s Terrorist Content Analytics Platform...

This book offers the first sustained investigation into non-elite understandings of radicalisation and counter-radicalisation policy. Drawing on original focus group research with students from universities across England and Wales, the book explores how ‘ordinary’ citizens understand radicalisation, how they make sense of counter-radicalisation in...

The Online Safety Act creates the power to impose a Terrorism Content Notice on providers of user-to-user services, requiring them to identify and swiftly remove terrorism content that has been communicated publicly, not privately. A distinction between public and private communications has also been drawn in the practical application of the encour...

A key part of the United Kingdom’s counter-terrorism framework, the Prevent Strategy is designed to operate ‘upstream’ to stop people becoming or supporting terrorists. In February 2023 the long-awaited independent review of Prevent reported, evaluating the Strategy against its core objectives. Led by Sir William Shawcross, the report claimed that...

This report was produced as part of the EU-funded Tech Against Terrorism Europe project. Its aims to provide an overview of the response of the tech industry to online terrorist and violent extremist content. The report begins with some contextual background, describing the diverse range of online services utilised by terrorists and extremists and...

This is the introduction to a special issue, comprised of five papers presented at the 2022 Terrorism and Social Media Conference, that examines tech companies' moderation of online terrorist content and the regulation of these moderation efforts.

This chapter considers three types of online data available for researchers. First, it looks at machine learning and its use when considering the vast amount of data available to detect indicators of involvement in terrorism. Next, the chapter considers case studies and their use when addressing ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions. Given the difficulty of re...

This chapter focuses on three of the methods used in the United Kingdom to disrupt terrorist operations: prosecution; deportation, and Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures (TPIM). Recognizing that special counterterrorism laws and policies are necessary, and that respect for human rights and the rule of law is an essential component of a...

Seeking to explore the nature of European far-right online ecosystems, this research report examines the outlinking activity of identified pro-far-right users among the followers of the official Twitter accounts of two prominent far-right European political parties, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and France’s Rassemblement National (RN...

In the face of content takedown and account suspensions on the biggest social media platforms, terrorist groups and their supporters have resorted to the use of file-sharing sites to ensure stable access to their propaganda. Amongst those to have employed this strategy are supporters of the so-called Islamic State (IS). Yet, while studies have repe...

This is the introduction to a special issue of Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. The special issue showcases a total of seven articles that collectively widen the base of online terrorism research.

Article 5 of the Council of Europe Convention on the Prevention of Terrorism requires member states to criminalise “public provocation to commit a terrorist offence”. In the U.K., the realisation of this obligation is found in the “Encouragement of terrorism” offence contained in section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2006. As well as fulfilling the U.K.’s...

Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) can be used by organisations to assist their security teams in safeguarding their networks against cyber-attacks. This can be achieved by including threat data feeds into their networks or systems. However, despite being an effective Cyber Security (CS) tool, many organisations do not sufficiently utilise CTI. This i...

This chapter focuses on understandings and debates around cyberterrorism as well as the effect particular representations of this phenomenon have upon assessing its threat. The chapter begins by introducing various understandings of cyberterrorism and differentiates between narrow and broad conceptions as well as effects and intent based definition...

This article reports on a survey of researchers designed to capture current perspectives on core questions around cyberterrorism. The survey—conducted in 2017 as a follow-on to an initial, 2012, exercise—focused on questions of definition, threat and response. By documenting our findings in each of these areas—and highlighting developments in the y...

There are growing calls for the imposition of regulatory measures that require social media companies to do more to remove terrorist content from their platforms. Against this backdrop, this chapter discusses what form these measures should take. After detailing how terrorist groups' efforts to disseminate their propaganda utilise a variety of diff...

This collection contains nine essays written by speakers from the fifth International Countering Violent Extremism Research Conference, hosted by Swansea University in August 2018 and organised by Hedayah, Swansea University, TRENDS Research & Advisory, UN Women and M&C Saatchi. The essays present findings from a variety of geographical contexts, a...

The presence of Daesh on Twitter has greatly diminished over the past five years as its propaganda dissemination strategy has evolved. Yet some Daesh supporters have persevered in their use of Twitter, using throwaway accounts to share outlinks to pro-Daesh materials on other platforms. This article analyses 892 outlinks found in 11,520 tweets that...

The importance of the rule of law to an effective counterterrorism strategy is widely accepted. Adherence to rule of law values protects both the legitimacy and moral authority of counterterrorism policies and legislation. This paper focuses on tech companies' prohibitions on terrorism-promoting content and evaluates these from the perspective of t...

National governments and international governmental organisations have identified online radicalisation as one of today’s most pressing security challenges. It is thus unsurprising that there is a burgeoning literature on the topic. Within this literature, use of the terms “radicalisation”, “self-radicalisation”, “online radicalisation” and “echo c...

Social media and tech companies face the challenge of identifying and removing terrorist and extremist content from their platforms. This paper presents the findings of a series of interviews with Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) partner companies and law enforcement Internet Referral Units (IRUs). It offers a unique view on curre...

This paper focuses on the attempts by Daesh (also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS) to use Twitter to disseminate its online magazine, Rumiyah. It examines a dataset of 11,520 tweets mentioning Rumiyah that contained an outlink, to evaluate the success of Daesh’s attempts to use Twitter as a gateway to issues of its magazine.

Social-media companies make extensive use of artificial intelligence in their efforts to remove and block terrorist content from their platforms. This paper begins by arguing that, since such efforts amount to an attempt to channel human conduct, they should be regarded as a form of regulation that is subject to rule-of-law principles. The paper th...

Images are known to have important effects on human perception and persuasion. Jihadist groups are also known to make strategic use of emotive imagery and symbolism for persuasive ends. Yet until recently studies of the online magazines published by violent jihadist groups largely focused on their textual, not their image, content and, whilst the i...

In furtherance of its commitment to prosecuting suspected terrorists, the UK has enacted a large number of terrorism precursor offences. In this chapter we evaluate this use of the criminal sanction and suggest that there is a need for greater legislative restraint. We develop this argument by first examining three non-criminal methods of disruptin...

In 2012 members of the Cyberterrorism Project conducted a survey of researchers on cyberterrorism. A total of 118 responses were received, from researchers working in 24 countries across six continents. The findings were published in a report and series of four journal articles, listed below, examining understandings of cyberterrorism, assessments...

National governments and international governmental organisations have identified online radicalisation as one of today’s most pressing security challenges. It is thus unsurprising that there is a burgeoning literature on the topic. Within this literature, use of the terms “radicalisation”, “self-radicalisation”, “online radicalisation” and “echo c...

This paper examines how the jihadist terrorist groups Al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State discursively construct ‘the West’ as an alien, aberrant ‘other’ in their respective online propaganda magazines Inspire and Dabiq over a 5 year period (2010–2015). The analysis integrates insights from the field of Terrorism Studies into a Corpus Assisted...

This article presents findings from an empirical study of 39 issues of five online terrorist magazines in order to problematise the concept of religious terrorism. The presentation of the study’s findings focuses on the magazines’ textual content, examining the types of textual item each magazine contains, how the producers of the magazines perceiv...

In this study we examine the release on Twitter of a total of nine issues of Rumiyah, the online magazine of the so-called Islamic State (IS). The study addresses two sets of research questions, both of which seek to build upon our earlier pilot study of the release on Twitter of issue 15 of Dabiq (the forerunner to Rumiyah). First, our pilot study...

Terrorist use of the Internet has become a focus of media, policy, and scholarly attention in recent years. Terrorists use the Internet in a variety of ways, the most important being for propaganda purposes and operations-related content, but it is also potentially a means or target of attack. This book presents revised versions of a selection of p...

This chapter analyses the contents of so-called Islamic State's Dabiq magazine using the framework of responsive regulation. After a brief statement on methodology, the chapter begins by outlining the notion of responsive regulation and seeks to justify its application in this context. It argues that, whilst there are dissimilarities between the ef...

On 31 July 2016 so-called Islamic State (IS) released issue 15 of their online English-language magazine Dabiq. In the 24 days that followed a total of 11,586 distinct accounts posted tweets/retweets mentioning the new issue. Using a bespoke platform, the researchers collected details of all these accounts (e.g., profile text, date account was crea...

This essay presents quantitative findings from a study of five online terrorist magazines. Published between 1 January 2009 and 30 June 2015, the magazines were all produced by groups following a jihadist ideology. The essay’s analysis is organised into three strands: the composition of the magazines; the justifications advanced in, and motivations...

This article explores original empirical findings from a research project investigating representations of cyberterrorism in the international news media. Drawing on a sample of 535 items published by 31 outlets between 2008 and 2013, it focuses on four questions. First, how individuated a presence is cyberterrorism given within news media coverage...

This report contains findings from the Advanced Research Workshop supported by the NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme on terrorists’ use of the Internet, held at Dublin City University on 27th-29th June 2016. The event was co-organised by the Cyberterrorism Project and the VOX-POL Network of Excellence. The workshop consisted of a total...

This article explores constructions of cyberterrorism within the global news media between 2008 and 2013. It begins by arguing that the preoccupation with questions of definition, threat and response in academic literature on cyberterrorism is problematic, for two reasons. First, because it neglects the constitutivity of representations of cyberter...

The Internet is a transformative technology that terrorists are exploiting for the spread of propaganda and radicalizing new recruits. While Al Qaeda has a longer history, Islamic State is conducting a modern and sophisticated media campaign centered around online social networking. This article introduces and contextualizes the contributions to th...

This report stems from a research project on online terrorist magazines. The overarching objective of the project was to identify central narratives and themes, and to examine the communicative (language and images) devices used to advance these. This report provided an initial statistical overview of the dataset. The findings were subsequently sup...

This article explores findings from a global survey of the terrorism research community to explore whether states may be deemed capable of conducting cyberterrorism. The article begins with a brief review of recent literature on state terrorism, identifying empirical and analytical justifications for greater use of this concept. Following a discuss...

Governments are increasingly concerned with the threat of cyberterrorism. Many common law jurisdictions – including the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – have expanded their statutory definitions of terrorism to also encompass cyberattacks which do not result in violence to people or property but which do seriously interfere with, or cause se...

This article examines the way in which the English language international news media has constructed the threat of cyberterrorism. Analysing 535 news items published by 31 different media outlets across 7 countries between 2008 and 2013, we show that this coverage is uneven in terms of its geographical and temporal distribution and that its tone is...

This report provides an overview of findings from a research project exploring how mainstream media represent cyberterrorism. The research was conducted in the summer of 2013 and focused on a sample of thirty-one news outlets. These outlets were selected for reasons of accessibility, language, diversity of geographical origin, and, diversity of pol...

This report contains findings from the Cyberterrorism Project’s symposium on terrorists’ use of the Internet. The event was hosted by Swansea University, UK, on 5-6 June 2014. 43 delegates attended the symposium, including researchers from a number of UK universities, as well as institutions in the Republic of Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Norw...

In today’s ‘pre-crime’ society it is easy to understand the appeal of a technology that promises to identify terrorist plots and stop attacks before they happen – even when the would-be perpetrators have never previously attracted the attention of the authorities or aroused any suspicion (unknown unknowns, in Rumsfeldian terminology). Mass dataveil...

This article reports on a recent survey designed to capture understandings of cyberterrorism across the global research community. Specifically, it explores competing views, and the importance thereof, amongst 118 respondents on three definitional issues: (a) the need for a specific definition of cyberterrorism for either policymakers or researcher...

This article reports on findings from a survey on the concept of cyberterrorism from researchers working in twenty-four countries across six continents. Our aim is to contribute to the definitional debate in this area by exploring the boundaries between cyberterrorism and potentially related terms. Focusing on two questions from our survey in parti...

Chapter Overview: This chapter examines the use of the criminal law to prevent terrorist attacks by prohibiting online preparatory activities. The chapter begins by explaining our understanding of the term cyberterrorism, arguing that whilst it is important that cyberterrorism is construed narrowly it is also important to recognise that it is quali...

This is the first book to present a multidisciplinary approach to cyberterrorism. It traces the threat posed by cyberterrorism today, with chapters discussing possible technological vulnerabilities, potential motivations to engage in cyberterrorism, and the challenges of distinguishing this from other cyber threats. The book also addresses the rang...

This article reports on a recent research project exploring academic perspectives on the threat posed by cyberterrorism. The project employed a survey method, which returned 118 responses from researchers working across 24 different countries. The article begins with a brief review of existing literature on this topic, distinguishing between those...

This article argues that the courts, not the Home Secretary, should be empowered to issue Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures (TPIMs). It explains that at the heart of the debate are three questions: whether measures like TPIMs should be viewed primarily from the perspective of security or liberty; how we should conceive the executive a...

This report contains findings from The Cyberterrorism Project’s conference: A Multidisciplinary Conference on Cyberterrorism. The event was held at Jury’s Inn Hotel, Birmingham, UK on 11-12 April 2013. Forty-eight delegates attended the conference, including researchers from a number of UK universities, as well as institutions in the Republic of Ir...

This report provides an overview of findings from a project designed to capture current understandings of cyberterrorism within the research community. The project ran between June and November 2012, and employed a questionnaire which was distributed to over 600 researchers, authors and other experts. Potential respondents were identified using a c...

Although there has been a flurry of new anti-terrorism laws in the years since 9/11, which have had often far-reaching and significant effects, the framework which is most commonly used to explicate and evaluate these laws is widely regarded as unsatisfactory. The aim of this article is to develop an alternative framework. The article uses a number...

Taking the six terms of schoolboy Joseph Hills’ Anti-Social Behavior Order (ASBO) as its starting point, this commentary examines three general principles which the courts have said apply to the drafting of ASBO prohibitions and two broad categories of ASBO prohibitions – those which prohibit behavior that constitutes a criminal offense and those w...

The control order regime is set to be replaced by a new system of terrorism prevention and investigation measures (TPIMs) at the start of 2012. This paper focuses on three of the control order’s most contentious features, all of which will remain largely unchanged in the new system: the standard of proof; the forum for applications; and the use of...

The focus of this article is Swansea’s tiered approach to tackling youth anti-social behaviour. It discusses the findings of a series of interviews with individuals working in the city around the following four themes: de-escalation and diversion; consistency and avoiding net-widening; inclusionary welfarism and multi-agency partnership; and volunt...

Despite the order’s diminishing use in recent years, in the second half of 2009 the Government declared its intention to revive the ASBO. One of the most contentious features of the ASBO has always been its hybridity. This article discusses a way of addressing concerns about the ASBO’s hybridity which has hitherto received little consideration, nam...

The illegal use of off-road vehicles is a key concern in terms of personal safety and anti-social behavior. In 2006 the Department of Transport and the Association of Chief Police Officers agreed that for the purposes of s.185 of the Road Traffic Act 1988 off-road vehicles should be treated as 'motor vehicles' when on public roads. Further powers a...

Balancing the competing demands of security and liberty is commonly said to be the central task in anti-terrorism policy. This article begins by distinguishing two ways in which the notion of balance is presented – the trade-off thesis and the image of a set of scales – and argues that each is flawed as an analytical aid. It then goes on to show fu...

Contemporary discussions of counterterrorism policy tend to be dominated by the image of a set of scales. One pan contains security, the other contains liberty, and the task is to strike a balance between the two. This essay adds to existing critiques of this metaphor by focusing on its assumption that there is a shared understanding of what each o...

This article examines the framework which Herbert Packer devised for analyzing the criminal justice process. Warning against an indiscriminate use of the word “model”—something which Packer introduced, which critics of his work have perpetuated, and which today is commonplace in criminal justice research—it distinguishes three distinct tools which...

The Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) is one of the best known measures used to tackle anti-social behaviour. In keeping with the popular conception, the order is frequently used against young people. Of all ASBOs issued in England and Wales up to the end of 2005, roughly 40% were imposed on under-18s. This paper begins with a brief outline of the...

When the Government first proposed the creation of the Control Order, many commented on its apparent similarity with the Anti-Social Behaviour Order. Looking beyond the obvious similarities, the aim of this paper is to draw out two deeper themes which marked the development of both remedies. For each theme an apparent contradiction will also be ide...

The ASBO was designed for use in cases involving individuals who have persistently committed criminal acts of a certain level of seriousness in a particular area, making the lives of those living there unbearable. It was intended to provide a mechanism for the imposition of composite sentences on perpetrators of such behaviour - a sentence reflecti...

The ASBO was designed for use in cases involving individuals who have persistently committed criminal acts of a certain level of seriousness in a particular area, making the lives of those living there unbearable. It was intended to provide a mechanism for the imposition of composite sentences on perpetrators of such behaviour - a sentence reflecti...

This article discusses the definition of anti-social behaviour employed by section 1(1)(a) of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 for the purposes of the Anti-Social Behaviour Order. It argues that, if the ASBO is to remain at the forefront of the Government's campaign against anti-social behaviour, this section should be amended. The article begins by...

Should proceedings under section 1(1) of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 for the imposition of an anti-social behaviour order (ASBO) be classified, both domestically and for the purposes of Article 6 ECHR, as civil or criminal proceedings? This commentary discusses the House of Lords' answers to these questions in R (McCann & others) v Crown Court...