“(De) Securitising Muslims in Cyber space: Social Media, Civil society and Marginalisation After Charlie Hebdo and the Islamic State”

Project Information

DSMM

Grant agreement ID: 703613

DOI

10.3030/703613

Project closed

EC signature date 1 April 2016

Start date 1 October 2016

End date 30 September 2018

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 173 076,00

EU contribution

€ 173 076,00

Coordinated by

CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE CNRS
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DSMM (“(De) Securitising Muslims in Cyber space: Social Media, Civil society and Marginalisation After Charlie Hebdo and the Islamic State”)

Reporting period: 2016-10-01 to 2018-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

DSMM analyses the discourse created about British and French Muslims on the Twitter social media platform. Using machine learning, social network analysis and discourse analysis the project looks at large data sets of historical tweets to examine how, in different contexts, questions about Europe’s Muslims are addressed on twitter. Taking a bi-national, comparative approach, DSMM examines the coverage of these issues in two European states with the largest Muslim diaspora populations, the UK and France. This is important because both states demonstrate differences and similarities which make them ripe for comparison. The two states take very different approaches to the question of religious and ethnic difference in society – Britain is overtly multiculturalist while France is assimilationist and forbids the acknowledgement of ethnic differences at the national level. Both have been touched by episodes of jihadist violence in the past decade which are important influences on the discourse created on twitter about these communities. Importantly, DSMM looks to analyse not the general discourse created by these events, but the discourse generated specifically about Muslims.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

"These are the publications resulting from the project:

Outputs :
Depictions of Muslims during the Grenfell Tower Fire in London and how the combination of social network and discourse analysis can combine to show how fake news was refuted spontaneously on twitter :

In English :
- https://theconversation.com/grenfell-tower-how-twitter-users-fought-off-fake-news-to-honour-muslim-heroes-98059
En Francais :
- https://theconversation.com/incendie-de-la-tour-grenfell-a-londres-quand-twitter-refute-fake-news-et-islamophobie-98352
Fourthcoming :
- Blurring European and Islamic Values or Brightening the Good – Bad Muslim Dichotomy ? A Critical Analysis of French Muslim Victims of Jihadi Terror online on twitter and in Le Monde Newspaper (fourthcoming)
- Critical Studies in Terorrism. Confronting Orientalism, Colonialism and Determinism : De-constructing Contemporary French Jihadism (fourthcoming) in Tom Smith (eds) Global Jihad : Critical Perspectives from the ‘periphery’, I.B Taurus Press
- Co-authored with Richard Dron - Islam and the Grenfell Tower Fire : Four Dimensions of twitter discourse
- Muslim Security Memes : A Critical Analysis of How social media responds to Islamist terror threats in France.
- Co-athored with Dr Wasim Ahmed - Empowering the Fringes : Twitter Influence and Narratives during #Macronleaks

Outputs as presentations made at international scientific meetings:

Presentations at Scientific Conferences :
- British International Studies Association Conference, Bath, UK, June 2018
- Social Media Summer School, Vodice, Croatia, June 2018
- European Cities and Diversity Workship, Max Plank Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Gottingen, Germany 25-26 January 2018
- European Cities and Migration, Science Po Lyon, 17 November 2017
- Diaspora Studies Conference, Saint Petersburg, Russia, 8-10 September 2017
- Social Media Summer School, Vodice, Croatia June 2017
- British Sociological Association Conference, University of Manchester, United Kingdom 4-6 April 2017
- Islam in France and Europe, School of Advanced Studies, University of London, United Kingdom, March 2017
- Hong Kong Sociological Association Annual Conference, 7-8 December 2016"

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

"this project brings a wider societal impact through both increased understanding of the way that social media interacts with societal issues and also how narratives about Europes Muslim communities are created and disseminated. This is important because social media receives increasingly large traction as a key means by which social and political issues, grievances and causes are articulated. This project has thus far challenged dominant assumptions that social media is a place where fake news spreads easily and thus undermines truth and democracy. In the work that the project has done in a popular publication (with a journal article currently under review) it examined the #macronleaks scandal on twitter and demonstrated to the general public and scholars alike the dangers that social media can pose to contemporary democracy through it's tendency to give voice to unverifiable information outlets such as wikileaks.


DSMM has shown again the public and scholars through a popularised publication that has generated a journal article that is under review, that social media users actually spontaneously refute fake news stories. Thus during the Grenfell tower fire in London fake news narratives were spread about Muslims that Grenfell was a terror attack and that the fire was started on purpose by the Muslim residents of the tower. The study conducted on this under DSMM demonstrated that social media users, rather than simply believing and spreading such views, contested them and tweeted back news stories from reliable sources. This is important because it goes against the grain of vernacular knowledge that social media only works to spread unverifiable fake news narratives.

Additionally, this project has also shown that social media offers an important means through which terror incidents are nuanced by giving voice to narratives about the Muslim victims of terror attacks and thus makes the distinction between the European victim of terror and the Muslim terrorist hard to defend. This has been disseminated to scholars through a forthcoming journal publication. This is important because of the paradox where by terror attacks committed by Muslims are an extremely fringe phenomena numerically, yet account for the vast majority of media coverage of European Muslims.

Finally, the project has also established that social media demonstrates the paradoxical ways through which narratives about Muslims and terror are discussed on twitter in its discovery of the 'memification' of terror threats showing that humour and irony are also important aspects of how individuals use social media to respond to terror. This is important because it shows that terrorism is something that has become much more embedded in popular culture and forms part of the symbolic and discursive repertoire even in paradoxical situations such as the creation of humour. The project does not stop has, as an ongoing associate of LAMES I will continue to work on the issue and publish more.

Finally, the project has also enabled me as a researcher to report the findings of the project to practitioners in the field through my presentation to NGOs (tech against terrorism and le tete des artes) and also to government and military organisations including the European Command of the United States Armed Forces. Additionally, through media and TV appearances, on international news channels such as Al Jazeera, BBC, TRT World, Sky news and France 24 the findings of this project, and it's broader societal impacts, have reached a wide and diverse audience in the millions."

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