VOX-Pol Report Launch: Negotiating Responses to Online Terrorism Threats in the EU

The VOX-Pol report ‘Negotiating Responses to Online Terrorism Threats in the EU: State-Platform Diplomacy 2015 – 2019’ by Marguerite Borelli was launched on 17 November 2025. Valère Ndior (Professor of Law at the Université de Bretagne occidentale in France) and Gavin Sullivan (Reader in International Human Rights Law at the University of Edinburgh Law School) discussed the report with author Marguerite Borelli and VOX-Pol Coordinator, Stuart Macdonald.

About the report

This report analyses public-private relations between the European (in particular, French) authorities and Facebook, Google (YouTube) and Twitter on the subject of terrorist usage of social media between 2015 and 2019. In a qualitative approach, interview material is mobilised to investigate lived experiences of this early cooperation, focusing on how stakeholders defined and negotiated their involvement, navigated power relations and pursued strategies to establish working relations without abandoning their respective preferences. The report finds that, although cultural fault lines influenced the stakeholders’ perceptions of roles, enthusiasm for ‘automated’ moderation was shared across the public-private boundary, justifying the development of what can be called state-platform diplomacy.

About the author

Dr. Marguerite Borelli is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS CNRS) in Paris, where she works on the international Open Research Area (ORA) project “(Re-)claiming digital sovereignty in discourse, policy and practice” (ClaimSov). She obtained her PhD in 2025 from the Analysis and Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Media (CARISM), Paris-Panthéon-Assas University, with a thesis focused on the role of large social media corporations in the governance of terror-related threats online,
and the public-private relations surrounding terrorist uses of the internet. Her research has been published in English and French language journals, such as New Media & Society and Mots. Les langages du politique.