Sedition Hunters: A Quantitative Study of the Crowdsourced Investigation into the 2021 U.S. Capitol Attack
This research addresses how online crowdsourced investigations function, providing insights for understanding extremist event accountability, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new case.
The study analyzed the Sedition Hunters Twitter community, which aims to identify participants in the 2021 U.S. Capitol Attack, finding that information sharing is its main focus, with increased privacy awareness and key roles identified through social network analysis.
Social media platforms have enabled extremists to organize violent events, such as the 2021 U.S. Capitol Attack. Simultaneously, these platforms enable professional investigators and amateur sleuths to collaboratively collect and identify imagery of suspects with the goal of holding them accountable for their actions. Through a case study of Sedition Hunters, a Twitter community whose goal is to identify individuals who participated in the 2021 U.S. Capitol Attack, we explore what are the main topics or targets of the community, who participates in the community, and how. Using topic modeling, we find that information sharing is the main focus of the community. We also note an increase in awareness of privacy concerns. Furthermore, using social network analysis, we show how some participants played important roles in the community. Finally, we discuss implications for the content and structure of online crowdsourced investigations.