Exploring Radical Right-Wing Posting Behaviors Online

ABSTRACT

In recent years, researchers have shown a vested interest in developing advanced information technologies, machine-learning algorithms, and risk-assessment tools to detect and analyze radical content online, with increased attention on identifying violent extremists or measuring digital pathways of violent radicalization. Yet overlooked in this evolving space has been a systematic examination of what constitutes radical posting behaviors in general. This study uses a sentiment analysis-based algorithm that adapts criminal career measures – and is guided by communication research on social influence – to develop and describe three radical posting behaviors (high-intensity, high-frequency, and high-duration) found on a sub-forum of the most conspicuous right-wing extremist forum. The results highlight the multi-dimensional nature of radical right-wing posting behaviors, many of which may inform future risk factor frameworks used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies to identify credible threats online.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Richard Frank, Garth Davies, Martin Bouchard, Pete Simi, Barbara Perry, Maura Conway, and Tiana Gaudette for their invaluable feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

¹ The sub-forum went live online on September 12, 2001. An assessment of the first posting on the sub-forum suggests that it was not launched in response to the 9/11 terror attacks.

² The average sentiment score percentile does not have a criminal career equivalent. But in the online context, it seemed important to be able to differentiate between two authors who on average posted negative messages, but one posted negative messages that on average were more negative than the other author, especially when both parties posted similar volumes of negative content over similar periods of time on a forum.

³ All author names were assigned with pseudonyms to protect user anonymity. All online posts were quoted verbatim.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ryan Scrivens

Ryan Scrivens is an Assistant Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. He is also a Research Fellow at the VOX-Pol Network of Excellence and a Research Associate at the International CyberCrime Research Center at Simon Fraser University. Dr. Scrivens conducts problem-oriented interdisciplinary research, with a focus on the local, national, and international threat of terrorism, violent extremism, and hatred as it evolves on- and offline. His primary research interests include terrorists’ and extremists’ use of the Internet, right-wing terrorism and extremism, combating violent extremism, hate crime, research methods and methodology, and computational social science.