Temporal Behavioural Analysis of Extremists on Social Media: A Machine Learning Based Approach
September 18, 2023
Public opinion is of critical importance to businesses and governments. It represents the collective opinion and prevalent views about a certain topic, policy, or issue. Extreme public opinion consists of extreme views held by individuals that advocate and spread radical ideas for the purpose of radicalizing others. while the proliferation of social media gives unprecedented ...
Exploring Radical Right-Wing Posting Behaviors Online
September 18, 2023
In recent years, researchers have shown a vested interest in developing advanced information technologies, machine-learning algorithms, and risk-assessment tools to detect and analyze radical content online, with increased attention on identifying violent extremists or measuring digital pathways of violent radicalization. Yet overlooked in this evolving space has been a systematic examination of what constitutes radical ...
A comparison of ISIS foreign fighters and supporters social media posts: an exploratory mixed-method content analysis
September 18, 2023
This paper compares the social media posts of ISIS foreign fighters to those of ISIS supporters. We examine a random sample of social media posts made by violent foreign fighters (n = 14; 2000 posts) and non-violent supporters (n = 18; 2000 posts) of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) (overall n = 4,000 posts), from 2009 to 2015. We ...
Prevalent Sentiments of the Concept of Jihad in the Public Commentsphere
September 18, 2023
Certain studies of social conflicts and geopolitical processes through online social networks entail qualitative analysis. One such issue is the tension between Western and Muslim societies. We introduce computer-assisted qualitative sentiment analysis for the inquiry and extraction of varied sentiments. The analysis explores the prevalent meanings of the term jihad through discussions of Muslims and ...
ISIS at Its Apogee: The Arabic Discourse on Twitter and What We Can Learn From That About ISIS Support and Foreign Fighters
September 18, 2023
We analyze 26.2 million comments published in Arabic language on Twitter, from July 2014 to January 2015, when Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)’s strength reached its peak and the group was prominently expanding the territorial area under its control. By doing that, we are able to measure the share of support and aversion ...
Antisemetic content on Twitter
September 18, 2023
This report presents an analysis of the production and propagation of online antagonistic content related to Jews posted on Twitter between October 2015 and October 2016 in the UK. ...
Searching for Signs of Extremism on the Web: An Introduction to Sentiment-Based Identification of Radical Authors
September 18, 2023
As violent extremists continue to surface in online discussion forums, law enforcement agencies search for new ways of uncovering their digital indicators. Researchers have both described and hypothesized a number of ways to detect online traces of potential extremists, yet this area of inquiry remains in its infancy. This study proposes a new search method ...
Measuring Online Affects in a White Supremacy Forum
September 18, 2023
Since the inception of the World Wide Web, security agencies, researchers, and analysts have focused much of their attention on the sentiment found on hate-inspired web-forums. Here, one of their goals has been to detect and measure users’ affects that are expressed in the forums as well as identify how users’ affects change over time. ...
Autocommunicative Meaning-Making in Online Communication of the Estonian Extreme Right
September 18, 2023
This article analyses the online communication of the Estonian extreme right that appears to be characterized by an echo-chamber effect as well as enclosed and hermetic meaning-making. The discussion mainly relies on the theoretical frameworks offered by semiotics of culture. One of the aims of the article is to widen the scope of understanding of ...