Shifting Patterns of Extremist Discourse on Facebook: Analyzing Trends and Developments During the Israel-Hamas Conflict
For researchers studying online extremism, this paper provides a descriptive analysis of how real-world events influence extremist discourse on social media, but the findings are incremental and context-specific.
This study analyzes extremist Facebook data from July 2023 to June 2024, finding that shifts in engagement, sentiment, and topics correlate with key events of the Israel-Hamas conflict, with notable changes in group activity proportions and discourse topics.
This short paper explores trends in extremist Facebook data from July 2023 to June 2024. We examined engagement, sentiment, and topics within Facebook groups categorized as anti-Israel/Semitic, anti-Palestine/Muslim, and anti-both, mapping these trends against five major events related to the recent Israel-Hamas conflict. Our findings support the hypothesis that shifts in trends correspond with these key events, showing varying patterns across different group categories. We observed decreased activity proportion in anti-both groups and increased activity proportion in the two one-sided hate groups at the conflict's onset. This pattern reversed after the Israeli troop withdrawal from Khan Yunis, Gaza. During the conflict, negative content proportion surged, and neutral content proportion fell in all the three group categories. Anti-Palestine/Muslim groups' discourses shifted from religious to social media activism and political/protest around the time the war began, while anti-Israel/Semitic groups moved from political/protest to religious topics a couple of weeks before the war.