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VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

Psychological theories of mobilization tend to focus on explaining people’s motivations for action, rather than mobilization (“activation”) processes. To investigate the online behaviors associated with mobilization, we compared the online communications data of 26 people who subsequently mobilized to right-wing extremist action and 48 people who held similar extremist views but did not mobilize (N = 119,473 social media posts). In a three-part analysis, involving content analysis (Part 1), topic modeling (Part 2), and machine learning (Part 3), we showed that communicating ideological or hateful content was not related to mobilization, but rather mobilization was positively related to talking about violent action, operational planning, and logistics. Our findings imply that to explain mobilization to extremist action, rather than the motivations for action, theories of collective action should extend beyond how individuals express grievances and anger, to how they equip themselves with the “know-how” and capability to act.

The Syria conflict has been described as the most socially mediated in history, with online social media playing a particularly important role. At the same time, the everchanging landscape of the conflict leads to difficulties in applying analytical approaches taken by other studies of online political activism. Therefore, in this paper, we use an approach that does not require strong prior assumptions or the proposal of an advance hypothesis to analyze Twitter and YouTube activity of a range of protagonists to the conflict, in an attempt to reveal additional insights into the relationships between them. By means of a network representation that combines multiple data views, we uncover communities of accounts falling into four categories that broadly reflect the situation on the ground in Syria. A detailed analysis of selected communities within the antiregime categories is provided, focusing on their central actors, preferred online platforms, and activity surrounding “real world” events. Our findings indicate that social media activity in Syria is considerably more convoluted than reported in many other studies of online political activism, suggesting that alternative analytical approaches can play an important role in this type of scenario.

The advancement in technology has brought a new era in terrorism where Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become a major platform of communication with wide range of usage from message channeling to propaganda and recruitment of new followers in terrorist groups. Meanwhile, during the terrorist attacks people use OSNs for information exchange, mobilizing and uniting and raising money for the victims. This paper critically analyses the specific usage of OSNs in the times of terrorisms attacks in developing countries. We crawled and used Twitter’s data during Westgate shopping mall terrorist attack in Nairobi, Kenya. We then analysed the number of tweets, geo-location of tweets, demographics of the users and whether users in developing countries tend to tweet, retweet or reply during the event of a terrorist attack. We define new metrics (reach and impression of the tweet) and present the models for calculating them. The study findings show that, users from developing countries tend to tweet more at the first and critical times of the terrorist occurrence. Moreover, large number of tweets originated from the attacked country (Kenya) with 73% from men and 23% from women where original posts had a most number of tweets followed by replies and retweets.

This doctoral thesis takes the reader into elements of the strategy of using modern
communication as well the advocated monopoly of truth by jihadist groups world
wide.