Online Signals of Extremist Mobilization

Olivia Brown; Laura G. E. Smith; Brit Davidson; Daniel Racek; Adam Joinson

doi:10.1177/01461672241266866

Online Signals of Extremist Mobilization

Olivia Brown, Laura G. E. Smith, Brit Davidson, Daniel Racek, Adam Joinson

Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

Psychological theories of mobilization tend to focus on explaining people’s motivations for action, rather than mobilization (“activation”) processes. To investigate the online behaviors associated with mobilization, we compared the online communications data of 26 people who subsequently mobilized to right-wing extremist action and 48 people who held similar extremist views but did not mobilize (N = 119,473 social media posts). In a three-part analysis, involving content analysis (Part 1), topic modeling (Part 2), and machine learning (Part 3), we showed that communicating ideological or hateful content was not related to mobilization, but rather mobilization was positively related to talking about violent action, operational planning, and logistics. Our findings imply that to explain mobilization to extremist action, rather than the motivations for action, theories of collective action should extend beyond how individuals express grievances and anger, to how they equip themselves with the “know-how” and capability to act.

Original language	English
Journal	Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
Early online date	31 Jul 2024
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672241266866
Publication status	E-pub ahead of print - 31 Jul 2024

Data Availability Statement

All code and transformed data are available on the following OSF repository: https://osf.io/6dxep/?view_only=04f1f06899a04d6fa009958be411727d. The raw data are not available due to the nature of the content and to ensure that we adhere to the terms of service for each of the social networking platforms; however, we note that readers may access the public repositories from which these data were obtained by accessing the links in the Methods, Table 1.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Dr Lukasz Piwek for supporting the acquisition of the data and Cassie Lowery for her assistance in coding the qualitative data.

Funding

We acknowledge funding from the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (Award ES/V002775/1), which is funded in part by the United Kingdom security and intelligence services.

Funders	Funder number
CREST . Centre for Research Evidence & Security Threats

Keywords

collective action
extremism
intergroup processes
violence

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Social Psychology

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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10.1177/01461672241266866Licence: CC BY

Cite this

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Online Signals of Extremist Mobilization

Abstract

Data Availability Statement

Acknowledgements

Funding

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

UN SDGs

Access to Document

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