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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.

Freedom of Speech, the War on Terror, and What’s YouTube Got to Do with It: American Censorship during Times of Military Conflict

Moonshot partnered with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to analyze US search traffic in response to the threats posed by white supremacist narratives and ideology in the US this past year. The dominant socio-political events of 2020-2021—the COVID-19 pandemic, the widespread BLM protests and counter-protests, and the presidential election—coalesced to create fertile ground for white supremacists and other violent extremist movements to mobilize and recruit. From 18 August 2020 – 7 March 2021, we recorded 511,759 white supremacist searches across the United States. We identified trends such as anti-Black search traffic, interest in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and a sustained appetite for “The Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. Ultimately, we found that offline events seemed to catalyze search traffic for extremist content online.

Extremist groups’ online recruitment mechanisms frequently exploit the wide range of grievances and vulnerabilities experienced by individuals at-risk of radicalisation. While it is widely accepted that mental health and wellbeing play a vital role in resilience to violent extremism, most approaches tend to focus on preventing violent extremism through purely ideological means and are not sufficiently tailored to the individual at-risk.

In an effort to understand this audience further and, more importantly, the most effective means of preventing violent extremism, Moonshot conducted an experiment to assess the propensity among at-risk users in Indonesia to engage with ideological counter-content compared to psychosocial support content. The data gathered during this pilot indicate that psychosocial support is an area of unmet need among some of the individuals most vulnerable to violent jihadist recruitment online in Indonesia, and that this population is open to engaging with online support.

The Facebook Redirect Programme (FRP) is designed to combat violent extremism and dangerous organisations by redirecting users who have entered hate or violence-related search queries towards educational resources and outreach groups. A pilot of the programme was launched with delivery partners Life After Hate in May 2019 and Exit Australia in September 2019. It was specifically designed to ensure that individuals searching for white supremacist and/or neo-Nazi communities on Facebook would be offered authentic, meaningful and impactful support off-platform. The purpose of this pilot was to test the programme design and inform future deployments targeting both new geographies and other hate-based communities. Moonshot was contracted by Facebook to evaluate the pilot period of programme performance and make recommendations for future deployments. This report evaluates the pilot programme by examining:
-Facebook’s use of keywords and the safety module as a method of redirecting people off-platform;
-The full user journey from Facebook to delivery partner landing pages;
-The extent to which the pilot can be considered a proof of concept for future deployments.

Between 20 March and 14 September 2020, Moonshot investigated online far-right extremist searches in Bosnia & Herzegovina by analysing at-risk audience engagement with far-right extremist themes.

Our results show a significant number of searches were for far-right extremist themes relating to the region’s history of ethnic conflict, as well searches for international far-right memes and narratives. Interestingly, we found that at-risk users primarily search for and engage with far-right extremist terms in the English language, seeking out terms which have their roots in the region but are now used internationally, such as ‘Serbia Strong’ and ‘Remove Kebab’.