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VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

Fanaticism, Racism, and Rage Online is a critical exploration of digital hate culture and its myriad infiltrations into the modern online community. The book examines radical movements that have emerged both on the fringes of the Internet, as well as throughout the web’s most popular spaces where extremist voices now intermix with mainstream politics and popular culture. This investigation brings to light the different forms of extremist culture on the web, from the blatant hate websites, to the much more invasive faux-social networks, racist political blogs, and pseudo-scientific domains.

Far-right groups increasingly use social media to interact with other groups and reach their followers. Social media also enable ‘ordinary’ people to participate in online discussions and shape political discourse. This study compares the networks and discourses of Facebook pages of Western European far-right parties, movements and communities. Network analyses of pages indicate that the form of far-right mobilization is shaped by political opportunities. The absence of a strong far-right party offline seems to be reflected in an online network in which non-institutionalized groups are the most prominent actors, rather than political parties. In its turn, the discourse is shaped by the type of actor. Content analyses of comments of followers show that parties address the political establishment more often than immigration and Islam, compared to non-institutionalized groups. Furthermore, parties apply less extreme discursive practices towards ‘the other’ than non-institutionalized groups.

Online extremists’ use of social media poses a new form of threat to the general public. These extremists range from cyberbullies to terrorist organizations. Social media providers often suspend the extremists’ accounts in response to user complaints. However, extremist users can simply create new accounts and continue their activities. In this work we present a new set of operational capabilities to address the threat posed by online extremists in social networks. We use thousands of Twitter accounts related to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to develop behavioral models for these users—in particular, what their accounts look like and with whom they connect. We use these models to track existing extremist users by identifying pairs of accounts belonging to the same user. We then present a model for efficiently searching the social network to find suspended users’ new accounts based on a variant of the classic Pólya’s urn setup. We find a simple characterization of the optimal search policy for this model under fairly general conditions. Our urn model and main theoretical results generalize easily to search problems in other fields.

Social media have played an essential role in the jihadists’ operational strategy in Syria
and Iraq, and beyond. Twitter in particular has been used to drive communications over
other social media platforms. Twitter streams from the insurgency may give the illusion
of authenticity, as a spontaneous activity of a generation accustomed to using their
cell phones for self-publication, but to what extent is access and content controlled?
Over a period of three months, from January through March 2014, information was
collected from the Twitter accounts of 59 Western-origin fighters known to be in Syria.
Using a snowball method, the 59 starter accounts were used to collect data about the
most popular accounts in the network-at-large. Social network analysis on the data
collated about Twitter users in the Western Syria-based fighters points to the controlling
role played by feeder accounts belonging to terrorist organizations in the insurgency
zone, and by Europe-based organizational accounts associated with the banned British
organization, Al Muhajiroun, and in particular the London-based preacher, Anjem
Choudary.