# Universality and correlations in individuals wandering through an online extremist space

## TL;DR

This study uses stochastic walk physics to analyze online trajectories of social media users, revealing universal patterns and correlations that distinguish individuals likely to develop extremist support.

## Contribution

It introduces a unifying theoretical framework based on stochastic walks to describe online user trajectories and their relation to extremism development.

## Key findings

- Universal online lifetime characteristics identified
- Theoretical solutions describe trajectories of extremists and non-extremists
- Correlations suggest physics tools can quantify extremism risk

## Abstract

The 'out of the blue' nature of recent terror attacks and the diversity of apparent motives, highlight the importance of understanding the online trajectories that individuals follow prior to developing high levels of extremist support. Here we show that the physics of stochastic walks, with and without temporal correlation, provides a unifying description of these online trajectories. Our unique dataset comprising all users of a global social media site, reveals universal characteristics in individuals' online lifetimes. Our accompanying theory generates analytical and numerical solutions that describe the characteristics shown by individuals that go on to develop high levels of extremist support, and those that do not. The existence of these temporal and also many-body correlations suggests that existing physics machinery can be used to quantify and perhaps mitigate the risk of future events.