Online Library

VOX-Pol Blog post.

Between 2006 and 2012, two men working on opposite
sides of the struggle between global jihadis and the United
States faced of in New York City. One was the founder of
Revolution Muslim, a group which proselytized—online
and on New York streets—on behalf of al-Qa`ida. The
other led eforts to track the terrorist threat facing the
city. Here, they tell the inside story of the rise of Revolution
Muslim and how the NYPD, by using undercover ofcers
and other methods, put the most dangerous homegrown
jihadi support group to emerge on U.S. soil since 9/11
out of business. As the Islamic State adjusts to its loss of
territory, this case study provides lessons for current and
future counterterrorism investigations.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

No abstract available.

There can be few greater fears for a parent than their child being contacted by a stranger, indoctrinated with an extreme ideology, and encouraged to join a violent movement, all while accessing the internet from their bedroom. Children’s smartphones and computers
may be portals to the most dangerous places on earth. The use of the internet, and more specifically social media, by violent extremists is certainly nothing new. The technical skills and proficiency displayed by groups such as ISIS have been causing concern for governments, law enforcement, industry, schools, religious leaders, and parents around the world. In reality the radicalization of children is rare and particularly nuanced, and far from a linear process that exclusively occurs online. While the media have reported high-profile cases, such as the teenagers from Chicago who tried to leave the United States and join ISIS or the three girls from the United Kingdom who traveled through Turkey to Syria the frequency and nature of conversion to violent extremism is a lot more complex than often reported. Evidence from search histories, online interactions and social media profiles suggest that contact is being made by those intent on radicalizing others. However, while information can be sought and contact can be initiated, complete conversion to a violent ideology is not happening in isolation online. That is to say that the internet is serving as a facilitator, not a direct means of recruitment. In any case action needs to be taken to safeguard children and young people from these risks.

Measuring extremist behavior and discourse online presents a significant methodological challenge largely due to the volume of content. This paper assesses the extent to which discourse communities created by extremists identified through qualitative analysis in prior research are present in a novel Telegram dataset and can be identified through Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling and network analysis. It then compares the results of Louvian and Girvan-Newman network community detection methods and the topics assigned to each community to see if the underlying structure of association between topics is robust to the use of different community detection methods. The results indicate that it may be possible to map discourse communities through topic modeling and network analysis. However, the comparison of the algorithms is inconclusive. This work contributes to our understanding of how computational social science methods can be used to measure and analyze extremist use of the Internet at scale.