Shifting Patterns of Extremist Discourse on Facebook: Analyzing Trends and Developments During the Israel-Hamas Conflict

TL;DR

This study analyzes extremist Facebook group trends during the Israel-Hamas conflict, revealing how engagement, sentiment, and topics shifted in response to major events, highlighting dynamic patterns in online hate discourse.

Contribution

It provides a detailed temporal analysis of extremist Facebook discourse, linking trend shifts to specific conflict-related events and topic changes across different hate groups.

Findings

Decreased activity in anti-both groups at conflict onset

Increased activity in single-sided hate groups during the conflict

Content sentiment became more negative across all groups

Abstract

This short paper explores trends in extremist Facebook data from July 2023 to June 2024. We examined engagement, sentiment, and topics within Facebook groups categorized as anti-Israel/Semitic, anti-Palestine/Muslim, and anti-both, mapping these trends against five major events related to the recent Israel-Hamas conflict. Our findings support the hypothesis that shifts in trends correspond with these key events, showing varying patterns across different group categories. We observed decreased activity proportion in anti-both groups and increased activity proportion in the two one-sided hate groups at the conflict's onset. This pattern reversed after the Israeli troop withdrawal from Khan Yunis, Gaza. During the conflict, negative content proportion surged, and neutral content proportion fell in all the three group categories. Anti-Palestine/Muslim groups' discourses shifted from religious to social media activism and political/protest around the time the war began, while anti-Israel/Semitic groups moved from political/protest to religious topics a couple of weeks before the war.