Boogaloos
Challenges of Deplatforming Extremist Online Movements: A Machine-Learning Approach
December 5, 2024Online extremist movements are increasingly using social media communities to share content, spread their ideologies, recruit members, and mobilize offline activities. In recent years, mainstream platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, have adopted policies to remove or deplatform some of these movements. Yet online extremists are well-known for their abilities to adapt, self-censor, and migrate across ...
Online Group Dynamics Reveal New Gel Science
September 18, 2023A better understanding of how support evolves online for undesirable behaviors such as extremism and hate, could help mitigate future harms. Here we show how the highly irregular growth curves of groups supporting two high-profile extremism movements, can be accurately described if we generalize existing gelation models to account for the facts that the number ...
Hidden order across online extremist movements can be disrupted by nudging collective chemistry
September 18, 2023Disrupting the emergence and evolution of potentially violent online extremist movements is a crucial challenge. Extremism research has analyzed such movements in detail, focusing on individual- and movement-level characteristics. But are there system-level commonalities in the ways these movements emerge and grow? Here we compare the growth of the Boogaloos, a new and increasingly prominent ...
Network-Enabled Anarchy: How Militant Anarcho-Socialist Networks Use Social Media to Instigate Widespread Violence Against Political Opponents and Law Enforcement
September 18, 2023Our primary research question was whether memes and codewords, private or fringe online forums, and hybrid real-world/online militia—the three characteristic tactics that support outbreaks of extremist violence for both Jihadi and Boogaloo extremism—are also prevalent in anti-fascist and anarcho-socialist groups. To analyze the use and prevalence of memes and other coded language and activity, we ...
Cyber Swarming, Memetic Warfare and Viral Insurgency: How Domestic Militants Organize on Memes to Incite Violent Insurrection and Terror Against Government and Law Enforcement
September 18, 2023In this briefing, we document a recently formed apocalyptic militia ideology which, through the use of memes—coded inside jokes conveyed by image or text—advocates extreme violence against law enforcement and government officials. Termed the ‘boogaloo’, this ideology self-organizes across social media communities, boasts tens of thousands of users, exhibits a complex division of labor, evolves ...