The Dark Crawler

The rise in illicit drug trafficking on darknet markets (DNMs) was boosted by those restrictions imposed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims to put this trend into context by exploring the characteristics of vendors’ services and reputations and understand how products are advertised and what customers tend to value. Qualitative content analysis was conducted on a sample (n = 100) randomly selected from 6,357 product descriptions and a sample (n = 500) randomly selected from […]

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This chapter reports on Canadian research into online misinformation pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic. The qualitative research reported on herein forms part of our longer-term goal, i.e., the development of an artificial intelligence (machine-learning) tool to assist social media platforms, online service providers and government agencies in identifying and responding to misinformation on social media. In this chapter, we consider the ethical and legal issues pertaining to qualitative analysis of social media posts and the […]

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Although many researchers, practitioners, and policymakers are concerned about identifying and characterizing online posting patterns of violent extremists prior to their engagement in violence offline, little is empirically known about their online patterns generally or differences in their patterns compared to their nonviolent counterpart particularly. In this study, we drew from a unique sample of violent and nonviolent right-wing extremists to develop and compare their online posting typologies (i.e. super-posters, committed, engaged, dabblers, and non-posters) […]

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This study examines the posting behavioral patterns of both violent and non-violent right-wing extremists (RWEs) within a sub forum of the largest white supremacy web-forum, Stormfront, in general, and whether there are differences in each user types’ radical posting behavior over time, which may contribute to their collective identity formation in particular. This study represents an original contribution to the academic literature on violent online political extremism on three key fronts. Authors: Garth Davies, Ryan […]

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Disinformation attacks that make use of social media platforms, e.g., the attacks orchestrated by the Russian ‘‘Internet Research Agency’’ during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election campaign and the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK, have led to increasing demands from governmental agencies for AI tools that are capable of identifying such attacks in their earliest stages, rather than responding to them in retrospect. This research undertaken on behalf of the Canadian Armed Forces and Department […]

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