Williams, Samuel

Williams, Samuel
Start date:
October 2021
Research Topic:
Terrorism
Research pathway:
Research Supervisor:
Martin Innes
Supervising school:
School of Social Sciences,
Primary funding source:
ESRC

Title: How misinformation in the aftermath of terror attacks has been used to influence public reactions by the UK far-right.

Using a comparative case study design, and concepts attending to processes of social reaction, the research will engage with the following key questions:

• How have far-right groups exploited misinformation following terror attacks to influence public behaviour and understanding, both online and offline?
• Why have these groups constructed and communicated different types of messages following such events, and who have been their target audiences?
• What implications do these findings have for understanding terror events, processes of social reaction and the contemporary media ecosystem?

Empirically, two terrorist attacks will be focused on. In order to analyse public reactions to terrorist attacks, Twitter data will be collected using Brandwatch and Sentinel. Additionally, newspaper articles will be collected as well as far-right posts from both Twitter and Telegram. This data will be subject to both quantitative and qualitative analysis in order to address a particular gap in social scientific knowledge..