Ideological Themes in White Nationalist Online Recruitment

• In Event: New Research on Terrorism and Political Violence

Abstract

White nationalism is one of the largest domestic terror threats facing the United States, responsible for 75 percent of all extremist-related murders over the past decade. Despite this increasing threat, we know strikingly little about how radicalization and recruitment occur in this context. This paper starts to fill the gap by examining the rhetorical strategies extremist leaders use to recruit followers on social media, as well as their relative success in radicalizing sympathizers. We collect large-scale social media data from Twitter and Gab, identifying 6696 potential extremist individuals on Twitter and 2183 individuals on Gab from October 1st, 2020 to January 31st, 2021 that follow more than 20% of 38 accounts of alt-right and White nationalist thought leaders identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Using supervised machine learning methods, we classify the ideological and emotional content of these messages to assess two core questions: 1) How do changes in real-world power dynamics affect the thematic messaging of White Nationalist thought leaders, and 2) Which types of messages are most effective at engaging and mobilizing potential recruits? The findings of this study will offer key insights for limiting the proliferation of extremist content on social media, deescalating patterns of radicalization, and confronting head on the challenges of domestic extremism.

Authors

• Carly Nicole Wayne, Washington University in St. Louis

• Luwei Ying, University of California, Los Angeles