Educators, Solicitors, Flamers, Motivators, Sympathizers: Characterizing Roles in Online Extremist Movements
This research addresses the problem of understanding participant roles in online extremist movements for social media platforms and counter-extremism efforts, providing insights into role dynamics and influence, though it is incremental in building on existing extremism studies.
The study characterized roles within online extremist movements by analyzing 4,876 Facebook pages/groups linked to 289 extremist groups, identifying five roles (e.g., educators, solicitors) and finding that core roles like educators and solicitors are more stable and influential in spreading extremist content.
Social media provides the means by which extremist social movements, such as white supremacy and anti LGBTQ, thrive online. Yet, we know little about the roles played by the participants of such movements. In this paper, we investigate these participants to characterize their roles, their role dynamics, and their influence in spreading online extremism. Our participants, online extremist accounts, are 4,876 public Facebook pages or groups that have shared information from the websites of 289 Southern Poverty Law Center designated extremist groups. By clustering the quantitative features followed by qualitative expert validation, we identify five roles surrounding extremist activism: educators, solicitors, flamers, motivators, sympathizers. For example, solicitors use links from extremist websites to attract donations and participation in extremist issues, whereas flamers share inflammatory extremist content inciting anger. We further investigate role dynamics such as, how stable these roles are over time and how likely will extremist accounts transition from one role into another. We find that roles core to the movement, educators and solicitors, are more stable, while flamers and motivators can transition to sympathizers with high probability. We further find that educators and solicitors exert the most influence in triggering extremist link posts, whereas flamers are influential in triggering the spread of information from fake news sources. Our results help in situating various roles on the trajectory of deeper engagement into the extremist movements and understanding the potential effect of various counter extremism interventions. Our findings have implications for understanding how online extremist movements flourish through participatory activism and how they gain a spectrum of allies for mobilizing extremism online.