EurekAlert May 19, 2021
A team of researchers in the US (George Washington University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, industry) compared 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 to understand any system-level commonalities in the ways these movements emerge and grow. They showed that the early dynamics of these two online movements follow the same mathematical order despite their stark differences and the evolution of both movements, across scales, follows a single shockwave equation that accounts for heterogeneity in online interactions. These properties suggest specific policies to address online extremism and radicalization. They showed how actions by social media platforms could disrupt the onset and ‘flatten the curve’ of such online extremism by nudging its collective chemistry. The research results provide a system-level understanding of the emergence of extremist movements that yields fresh insight into their evolution and possible interventions to limit their growth…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Growth curves of online Boogaloo groups. Credit: Scientific Reports volume 11, Article number: 9965 (2021)