Uncovering the Wider Structure of Extreme Right Communities Spanning Popular Online Networks

TL;DR

This paper explores the interconnected online presence of extreme right groups across multiple social media platforms, focusing on Twitter's role in linking communities and tracking their evolution over time.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to unify heterogeneous online data into a single network for community detection and temporal analysis of extreme right communities.

Findings

Identified persistent English and German language extreme right communities.

Demonstrated Twitter's role as a gateway in the online extreme right network.

Tracked community evolution over time.

Abstract

Recent years have seen increased interest in the online presence of extreme right groups. Although originally composed of dedicated websites, the online extreme right milieu now spans multiple networks, including popular social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Ideally therefore, any contemporary analysis of online extreme right activity requires the consideration of multiple data sources, rather than being restricted to a single platform. We investigate the potential for Twitter to act as a gateway to communities within the wider online network of the extreme right, given its facility for the dissemination of content. A strategy for representing heterogeneous network data with a single homogeneous network for the purpose of community detection is presented, where these inherently dynamic communities are tracked over time. We use this strategy to discover and analyze persistent English and German language extreme right communities.