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

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 sh

SUBMITTER: Velasquez N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8134557 | biostudies-literature | 2021 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature