Online Library

The Internet and, in particular, Online Social Networks have changed the way that terrorist and extremist groups can influence and radicalise individuals. Recent reports show that the mode of operation of these groups starts by exposing a wide audience to extremist material online, before migrating them to less open online platforms for further radicalization. Thus, identifying radical content online is crucial to limit the reach and spread of the extremist narrative. In this paper, our aim is to identify measures to automatically detect radical content in social media. We identify several signals, including textual, psychological and behavioural, that together allow for the classification of radical messages. Our contribution is threefold: (1) we analyze propaganda material published by extremist groups and create a contextual text-based model of radical content, (2) we build a model of psychological properties inferred from these material, and (3) we evaluate these models on Twitter to determine the extent to which it is possible to automatically identify online radical tweets. Our results show that radical users do exhibit distinguishable textual, psychological, and behavioural properties. We find that the psychological properties are among the most distinguishing features. Additionally, our results show that textual models using vector embedding features significantly improves the detection over TF-IDF features. We validate our approach on two experiments achieving high accuracy. Our findings can be utilized as signals for detecting online radicalization activities.

The project Mapping Networks and Narratives of Online Right-Wing Extremists in New South Wales (NSW) used the systematic mining and analysis of online data to generate evidence-based insights into online right-wing extremism (RWE) across the state. The project was conducted between July 2019 and February 2020 with data collection occurring from August to November 2019. The project addressed three key areas:

– What is the nature of the online RWE environment in NSW?
– How are themes and narratives framed in different online contexts in order to mobilise support?
– What level of risk does the online RWE environment pose?

The research areas were framed as broad questions to facilitate wide exploratory research into the online RWE movement in NSW, a milieu that has been little studied. This breadth of scope was considered pertinent in the wake of the March 2019 mass casualty terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, by an attacker originating from NSW.