Most posts in extremist online forums are made by a clique of particularly committed members, a major new study shows.
August 30, 2022
Most posts in extremist online forums are made by a clique of particularly committed members, a major new study shows.
Experts who have spent years analyzing activity on the chatrooms have also discovered they have identical participation structures. Their findings are crucial intelligence for those working to tackle online extremism and radicalization.
A very small elite of „hyper-posters“ can be responsible for up to a third of all posts, followed by a slightly bigger class of „super-posters“ who are committed but show more restraint. „Normo-posters“ contribute occasionally, and the majority of members are „hypo-posters“ who have only posted once or a couple of times.
Hyper-posters are not necessarily the most central or connected members of extremist forums, and some less active posters also occupy central influential positions in discussions. Hypo-posters tend to be scattered at the periphery of the network, engaging in one or a handful of threads only.
This pattern holds regardless of the ideology (far-right, Salafi-Jihadist, Incel), language (English, French, Arabic, German), or size of the online forum.
