Solutions to Detect and Analyze Online Radicalization : A Survey

Online Radicalization (also called Cyber-Terrorism or Extremism or Cyber-Racism or Cyber- Hate) is widespread and has become a major and growing concern to the society, governments and law enforcement agencies around the world. Research shows that various platforms on the Internet (low barrier to publish content, allows anonymity, provides exposure to millions of users and a potential of a very quick and widespread diffusion of message) such as YouTube (a popular video sharing website), Twitter (an online micro-blogging service), Facebook (a popular social networking website), online discussion forums and blogosphere are being misused for malicious intent. Such platforms are being used to form hate groups, racist communities, spread extremist agenda, incite anger or violence, promote radicalization, recruit members and create virtual organi- zations and communities. Automatic detection of online radicalization is a technically challenging problem because of the vast amount of the data, unstructured and noisy user-generated content, dynamically changing content and adversary behavior. There are several solutions proposed in the literature aiming to combat and counter cyber-hate and cyber-extremism. In this survey, we review solutions to detect and analyze online radicalization. We review 40 papers published at 12 venues from June 2003 to November 2011. We present a novel classification scheme to classify these papers. We analyze these techniques, perform trend analysis, discuss limitations of existing techniques and find out research gaps

The temporal evolution of a far-right forum

The increased threat of right-wing extremist violence necessitates a better understanding of online extremism. Radical message boards, small-scale social media platforms, and other internet fringes have been reported to fuel hatred. The current paper examines data from the right-wing forum Stormfront between 2001 and 2015. We specifically aim to understand the development of user activity and the use of extremist language. Various time-series models depict posting frequency and the prevalence and intensity of extremist language. Individual user analyses examine whether some super users dominate the forum. The results suggest that structural break models capture the forum evolution better than stationary or linear change models. We observed an increase of forum engagement followed by a decrease towards the end of the time range. However, the proportion of extremist language on the forum increased in a step-wise matter until the early summer of 2011, followed by a decrease. This temporal development suggests that forum rhetoric did not necessarily become more extreme over time. Individual user analysis revealed that super forum users accounted for the vast majority of posts and of extremist language. These users differed from normal users in their evolution of forum engagement

When the Trumpet Call is Unclear: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Speech That Launched the Jesus Seminar

Since the Jesus Seminar has become almost iconic in religious media coverage, it merits academic scrutiny. This article focuses on the Seminar\u27s inaugural address given by founder Robert Funk on March 21, 1985, at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. In that address, Funk set forth the Seminar\u27s mission and method that has guided the association ever since. The main thesis of this article is that clues to the Seminar\u27s successes and failures may be found in Funk\u27s inaugural address, which may be uncovered through a text-in-context analysis of the speech

Learning from the parallel field of terrorism studies.

Comments on an article by T. W. Briggs and J. W. Pollard (see record 2020-26206-005). Briggs and Pollard make a convincing case for the advancement of computational modeling and simulation of mass violence for threat assessment and management. The purpose of this commentary is to look into the analogous study of terrorism to pinpoint recent areas of advancement. We narrow our focus to three core areas, two of which heavily overlap with core areas identified by Briggs and Pollard: (a) computational linguistic approaches, (b) spatial modeling, and (c) network based designs. Historically, the fields of both (a) threat assessment and management and (b) terrorism studies grew in silos. The aim here is for a much greater alignment in research agendas moving forward. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved

Cloaked Facebook pages: Exploring fake Islamist propaganda in social media

This research analyses cloaked Facebook pages that are created to spread political propaganda by cloaking a user profile and imitating the identity of a political opponent in order to spark hateful and aggressive reactions. This inquiry is pursued through a multi-sited online ethnographic case study of Danish Facebook pages disguised as radical Islamist pages, which provoked racist and anti-Muslim reactions as well as negative sentiments towards refugees and immigrants in Denmark in general. Drawing on Jessie Daniels’ critical insights into cloaked websites, this research furthermore analyses the epistemological, methodological and conceptual challenges of online propaganda. It enhances our understanding of disinformation and propaganda in an increasingly interactive social media environment and contributes to a critical inquiry into social media and subversive politics

A Framework for Identifying Malware Threat Distribution on the Dark Web

The Dark Web is an ever-growing phenomenon that has not been deeply explored. It is no secret that in recent years, malware has become a powerful threat to technology users. The Dark Web is known for supporting anonymity and secure connections for private interactions. Over the years, it has become a rich environment for displaying trends, details, and indicators of emerging malware threats. Through the application of data science and open-source intelligence techniques, trends in malware distribution can be studied. In this research, we create a framework for helping identify malware threat distribution patterns. We examine this type of Dark Web activity by utilizing an automated and manual approach for collecting data on malware exchanges. Furthermore, a comparative analysis is conducted to determine which approach is more effective and efficient. Our framework for identifying current or future malware threats that are distributed on the Dark Web is refined by examining the weaknesses and strengths of each gathering approach

A systematic survey of online data mining technology intended for law enforcement

As an increasing amount of crime takes on a digital aspect, law enforcement bodies must tackle an online environment generating huge volumes of data. With manual inspections becoming increasingly infeasible, law enforcement bodies are optimising online investigations through data-mining technologies. Such technologies must be well designed and rigorously grounded, yet no survey of the online data-mining literature exists which examines their techniques, applications and rigour. This article remedies this gap through a systematic mapping study describing online data-mining literature which visibly targets law enforcement applications, using evidence-based practices in survey making to produce a replicable analysis which can be methodologically examined for deficiencies