Hidden order across online extremist movements can be disrupted by nudging collective chemistry

N Velásquez,N F Johnson,R Sear,L Illari,Y Lupu,N Johnson Restrepo,R Leahy,P Manrique

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-89349-3

N Velásquez, N F Johnson + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-89349-3

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Abstract

Disrupting the emergence and evolution of potentially violent online extremist movements is a crucial challenge. Extremism research has analyzed such movements in detail, focusing on individual- and movement-level characteristics. But are there system-level commonalities in the ways these movements emerge and grow? Here we compare the growth of the Boogaloos, a new and increasingly prominent U.S. extremist movement, to the growth of online support for ISIS, a militant, terrorist organization based in the Middle East that follows a radical version of Islam. We show that the early dynamics of these two online movements follow the same mathematical order despite their stark ideological, geographical, and cultural differences. The evolution of both movements, across scales, follows a single shockwave equation that accounts for heterogeneity in online interactions. These scientific properties suggest specific policies to address online extremism and radicalization. We show how actions by social media platforms could disrupt the onset and ‘flatten the curve’ of such online extremism by nudging its collective chemistry. Our results provide a system-level understanding of the emergence of extremist movements that yields fresh insight into their evolution and possible interventions to limit their growth.

Highlights

Disrupting the emergence and evolution of potentially violent online extremist movements is a crucial challenge
On a daily basis during that period, we manually searched for groups using common hashtags and keywords. This list of groups for each day was updated to include only those appearing to express a strong allegiance to ISIS. Since no such support was observed on Facebook, likely as a result of its being removed quickly, we looked on another social media platform based in Europe, VKontakte, which was comparatively slow in removing ISIS support
The political, social, and behavioral differences between the two movements are stark, yet we find many similarities at the system level in terms of the patterns their online growth seems to follow

Summary

Introduction

Disrupting the emergence and evolution of potentially violent online extremist movements is a crucial challenge. We show that the early dynamics of these two online movements follow the same mathematical order despite their stark ideological, geographical, and cultural differences The evolution of both movements, across scales, follows a single shockwave equation that accounts for heterogeneity in online interactions. This work builds on the physics, chemistry, and mathematics literature, with the generalization that particles (individuals) that are typically treated as identical can be different, and this can affect how they form groups (e.g. via homophily). This approach makes the mathematical aspect of our research potentially of interest in its own right, in addition to the proposed application

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