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The current study set out to investigate to what extent ISIS is bolstering its jihadist ideology on a 'cut-and-paste' or 'cherry-picked' version of Islam in their renowned online propaganda magazine Dabiq. The main objective was to examine in a systematic and quantitative way to what extent ISIS utilizes the Koran in an atomistic, truncated and tailored manner to bolster its religious legitimacy. A total of 15 issues of Dabiq and 700 Koranic references were scrutinized. By means of a quantitative analysis we developed an innovative taxonomy of Koranic chapters and verses (i.e. surahs and ayat, respectively) on the basis of their appearance in Dabiq. Our large-scale data analysis provide consistent empirical evidence for severe decontextualization practices of the Koran in three ways: (1) a thin, Medinan-dominated religious layer, (2) ayah mutilation, and (3) clustered versus exclusive mentions. Limitations and implications for future research, policy makers and CVE initiatives are discussed.

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For years, social media, including Facebook, have been criticized for lacking transparency in their community standards, especially in terms of extremist content. Yet, moderation is not an easy task, especially when extreme-right actors use content strategies that shift the Overton window (i.e., the range of ideas acceptable in public discourse) rightward. In a self-proclaimed search of more transparency, Facebook created its Transparency Center in May 2021. It also has regularly updated its community standards, and Facebook Oversight Board has reviewed these standards based on concrete cases, published since January 2021. In this paper, we highlight how some longstanding issues regarding Facebook’s lack of transparency still remain unaddressed in Facebook’s 2021 community standards, mainly in terms of the visual ‘representation’ of and endorsement from dangerous organizations and individuals. Furthermore, we also reveal how the Board’s no-access to Facebook’s in-house rules exemplifies how the longstanding discrepancy between the public and the confidential levels of Facebook policies remains a current issue that might turn the Board’s work into a mere PR effort. In seeming to take as many steps toward shielding some information as it has toward exposing others to the sunshine, Facebook’s efforts might turn out to be transparency theater.

Belgium is a notorious source of foreign fighters in the current Syrian-Iraqi conflict. It has the highest per capita number of Western Europe, and has already contributed substantially to the terrorist threat that some of the returning fighters pose. Belgian authorities have been straightforward from early on in admitting the scale of this phenomenon, but still they do not offer much detail about who exactly is hiding behind the figures. Aiming at a better insight, the authors of this policy brief maintain an independent database, which they use here to investigate the backgrounds of Belgium's foreign fighters. While most of them are Belgian citizens, almost half are linked to Morocco, and rather surprisingly Russia comes second in foreign backgrounds. A comparison between the Moroccan and the Eastern contingent (all former Soviet Union and Eastern European states) reveals significant differences -in terms of recruitment for instance -that may be important for the prevention and the detection of radicalism. The main finding however is that too little is known about this Eastern contingent. This is likely also the case in other European countries, partly due to its covert way of operating. But it also highlights the risk in every country of focusing too much on the most dominant groups in terms of radicalization, potentially neglecting others that may be hidden in other diaspora communities.

How jihadi Salafists sometimes breach, but mostly circumvent, Facebook's community standards in crisis, identity and solution framesWe analyzed posts written by Facebook profiles who advocate violent jihad without supporting any terrorist group. They share extremist content in the middle of regular posts, thanks to which they are likely to reach a large audience. We identified to what extent their ingroup-outgroup opposition is constructed in crisis, identity, and solution frames and how they use these frames in posts which sometimes breach Facebook's community standards, but which mostly circumvent them through various strategies of doublespeak. Among them, myth, in the sense of Barthes, and eudaimonic content appeared as particularly powerful to naturalize and spread jihadi ideology on social media.

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