Understanding and Responding to Domestic Extremism Financing

• In Event: NIJ Day: Online Interactions Leading to Radicalization: Mobilization to Violent Extremism and Internet Safety

Abstract

How are illegal domestic extremism activities funded? What strategies are used to hide funding, to minimize traceability, or to avoid financial transactions? Understanding and responding appropriately to the threat of violence by domestic extremism is difficult, given that financial transactions can be impossible to observe—particularly if the individuals are self-funded. This proposal addresses a crucial but difficult piece of the challenge: understanding how financing extremism is talked about and the strategies that are used to obtain and hide money.
The project is analyzing social media discussions of financing strategies across a variety of mainstream and fringe online platforms as well as the dark web. By hand-coding messages to train a machine-learning model, the project is identifying extremist communities on each platform. Additional analyses will distinguish conversations related to money and will describe the strategies or methods used to finance activities in each community. Finally, the project will describe finance-related connections between communities and across external sites, for example to crowdfunding sites or cryptocurrency wallets.
The project will develop information and tools to help law enforcement and others involved in intervening to prevent future violence. For example, the findings will enable the identification of red flags in publicly available information sources that could inform risk assessment and planning. They will also enable inter-agency cooperation, for example by sharing clear web information that points to activity occurring on the dark web.

Authors

• Caitlin McCulloch, RAND Corporation

• Luke Matthews, RAND Corporation