Extremist organization members are growing more and more active on social media to plan, harass, recruit, and incite. In 2016 on Twitter alone, 360,000 ISIS accounts were shut down.
Researchers have found a way to predict extremist users before they even post content. Turns out, extremists of all persuasions are fairly predictable.
Extremist organizations – be it White Nationalists and the Alt-Right, or be it ISIS – user social media to incite division and violence, harass other users, coordinate action, and recruit support.
Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have taken steps to suspend these user profiles and censor content, but these policies rely heavily on user reporting. Not to mention that once suspended the extremist can just open a new account with another email address.
The solution is to identify these users before they can post harmful content and anticipate their reentry onto the social media platform when they are kicked off.
Operations Research recently published research that has developed a method for doing just that. Researchers identified 5,000 Twitter users known to be either ISIS members, or had a significant number of followers who were known ISIS members. Researchers viewed 4.8 million tweets. They also tracked account suspensions of the 5,000 users, and of their friends and followers.
Through this data and statistical modeling with regards to extremist behavior, they were able to develop a methodology to predict new extremist users before the new user posted any content. They were also able to identify which different accounts were actually owned by the same user, as well as where in the social network extremists would reenter with a new user name after being suspended from Twitter.
This worked for ISIS, but are all extremists created equal in how they use social media? Will a White Nationalist tweet in the same predictable way as a member of Al-Qaeda?
According to this study, yes.
As it turns out, extremists tend to share the same social media behavioral characteristics, regardless of what their extreme stance actually is. They seek out a very targeted group of users and when they create new accounts, the new social media group is very similar to the original one, and the new name tends to resemble the suspended name as to contain a hint to the group that it is the same user on a new account.
From this research, a methodology was developed to identify extremists and identify where they will reenter the social network. This does not rely on user reporting, but rather statistical modeling of shared behavioral characteristics online.
Even though extremist social media accounts can be predicted without user reporting, this methodology and the technology to implement it is still relatively new, not fool-proof, and has yet to spread. Stay active in your online communities and continue to report violent and hateful content, and user harassment. The predictable ones are the ones that get caught through algorithm, and not everyone is predictable.
If you are being harassed online by an extremist, if you have been targeted for recruitment, or if you come across a suspicious user, with the help of a PI you can utilize this methodology to get to the bottom of it. Contact me at Mignolet@Bellsouth.net to learn more.