Online Library

VOX-Pol Blog post.

Far-right and involuntary celibate extremists are said to populate an “online extremist ecosystem” of digital media environments. Online violent extremists are said to use this “ecosystem” to access outcomes that were previously unattainable. Yet there remained fundamental knowledge gaps in understanding the advantageous and limits of using ecosystems to understand and address far-right and involuntary celibate online violent extremism. This foundational theoretical and empirical study critically assessed whether ecosystems offered a greater or lesser understanding of these communities in the Australian and Canadian context and examined how individual involvement in these communities is shaped by digital media software and hardware.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

A better understanding of how support evolves online for undesirable behaviors such as extremism and hate, could help mitigate future harms. Here we show how the highly irregular growth curves of groups supporting two high-profile extremism movements, can be accurately described if we generalize existing gelation models to account for the facts that the number of potential recruits is timedependent and humans are heterogeneous. This leads to a novel generalized Burgers equation that describes these groups’ temporal evolution, and predicts a critical influx rate for potential recruits beyond which such groups will not form. Our findings offer a new approach to managing undesirable groups online – and more broadly, managing the sudden appearance and growth of large macroscopic aggregates in a complex system – by manipulating their onset and engineering their growth curves.

Severe online hate and harassment increased four points across the board in the past year, which was dominated by an unprecedented surge in antisemitism online and offline in the wake of Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel on October 7. Decreases in platform enforcement and data access and new threats of hate and disinformation from generative AI tools all potentially contributed to this year’s findings.

ADL conducts this nationally representative survey annually to find out how many American adults experience hate or harassment on social media. Since 2022, we have also surveyed teens ages 13-17. This survey was conducted in February and March 2024 and asked about the preceding 12 months.

Key Findings

• Severe harassment overall went up: 22% of Americans experienced severe harassment¹ on social media in the past 12 months, an increase from 18% in 2023 (including an increase in physical threats from 7% to 10%).
• Harassment by disability: People with disabilities were more likely to be harassed than non-disabled people, 45% compared to 36% respectively for any harassment and 31% vs. 19% for severe harassment.
• People with disabilities were more likely to be harassed than in the year before, 45% compared to 35% for any harassment and 31% vs. 20% for severe harassment
• Harassment for disability spiked: Reasons for online harassment in the past 12 months remained stable, except for disability, which spiked from 4% to 12%, despite the proportion of disabled respondents remaining similar.
• LGBTQ+ people were the most harassed of the marginalized groups surveyed: LGBTQ+ people experienced increases in physical threats (from 6% to 14%), while transgender people, as a subgroup, reported severe harassment to a higher degree from last year (from 30% to 45%).
• Jewish adults were more likely to be harassed for their religion (34% of those harassed compared to 18% of non-Jews) and 41% changed their online behavior to avoid being recognized as Jewish. Nearly two-thirds (63%) felt less safe than they did last year.
• Platforms: Facebook remains the most common platform where harassment was experienced at 61% of harassment, while the incidence of harassment rose on WhatsApp (from 14% to 25%) and Telegram (from 7% to 13%).

Key Recommendations

Allow researchers inside the black box: The federal government should broaden data access for researchers and follow California’s lead and require technology companies to standardize transparency reporting and broaden data access.

Address hate on messaging apps: Messaging platforms should strengthen anti-hate policies and invest in tools to combat hate and harassment.

Support targets of hate: Platforms should implement recommended reporting tools and features that reduce hate and improve abuse reporting.

Invest in trust and safety: Tech companies should increase trust and safety resources (human and automated) to ensure platforms are enforcing their rules around hate speech and violence.