Detecting psychological change through mobilizing interactions and changes in extremist linguistic style

Smith, Laura G. E.; Wakeford, Laura; Cribbin, Timothy; Barnett, Julie; Hou, Wai Kai

doi:10.1016/j.chb.2020.106298

Cited by 30 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 51 publications

(70 reference statements)

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“…Overall, the present study demonstrates that supporters and opponents are not just individuals who hold competing views about what it means to be Australian; rather, they are individuals who belong to distinct and opposing psychological groups that endorse contrasting narratives about Australian identity. Thus, when they interact online they reproduce patterns that may occur within and between other groups in conflict (such as racist and activist groups, see Bliuc et al, 2019; Bliuc et al, 2018; Faulkner & Bliuc, 2018; Smith et al, 2020).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“You wouldn’t celebrate September 11”: Testing online polarisation between opposing ideological camps on YouTube

Bliuc

Smith

Moynihan

2020

Group Processes & Intergroup Relations

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Online communication is increasingly associated with growing polarisation in society. In this research, we test a dual-pathway model of online polarisation via intergroup and intragroup interaction of supporters of opposing ideological camps on YouTube. The interaction occurs over a video parody promoting a campaign to change the date of Australia Day celebrations, a divisive issue entailing contrasting narratives about Australian identity, meanings of Australia Day, and interpretations of colonial history. To capture ideological polarisation, we conducted computerised linguistic analysis of polarised talk in the form of comments and replies ( N = 1,027) from supporters and opponents of the campaign. The indicators used to capture polarisation are social identification, position certainty, and psychological distance (as reflected by increased anxiety and hostility). Our results show that most polarisation (in the form of increased hostility) occurs in conditions of expression of outgroup dissent (the intergroup interaction pathway) and the most debated content on the online forum revolves around themes relevant to group identity. In addition to contributing to the understanding of group process in an online context, another key contribution of this research is providing a theory-driven method and blueprint to detect polarisation in social media data.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“You wouldn’t celebrate September 11”: Testing online polarisation between opposing ideological camps on YouTube

Bliuc

Smith

Moynihan

2020

Group Processes & Intergroup Relations

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“…( 2018 ); Smith et al. ( 2020 ) TF 50% Abdelzaher ( 2019 ); Agarwal and Sureka ( 2015 ); Ben-David and Fernández ( 2016 ); Bisgin et al. ( 2019 ); Chen ( 2008 ); de Pablo et al.…”

Section: Nlp Techniques For Extremism Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

A survey on extremism analysis using natural language processing: definitions, literature review, trends and challenges

Torregrosa

Bello-Orgaz

Martínez‐Cámara

et al. 2022

J Ambient Intell Human Comput

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Extremism has grown as a global problem for society in recent years, especially after the apparition of movements such as jihadism. This and other extremist groups have taken advantage of different approaches, such as the use of Social Media, to spread their ideology, promote their acts and recruit followers. The extremist discourse, therefore, is reflected on the language used by these groups. Natural language processing (NLP) provides a way of detecting this type of content, and several authors make use of it to describe and discriminate the discourse held by these groups, with the final objective of detecting and preventing its spread. Following this approach, this survey aims to review the contributions of NLP to the field of extremism research, providing the reader with a comprehensive picture of the state of the art of this research area. The content includes a first conceptualization of the term extremism, the elements that compose an extremist discourse and the differences with other terms. After that, a review description and comparison of the frequently used NLP techniques is presented, including how they were applied, the insights they provided, the most frequently used NLP software tools, descriptive and classification applications, and the availability of datasets and data sources for research. Finally, research questions are approached and answered with highlights from the review, while future trends, challenges and directions derived from these highlights are suggested towards stimulating further research in this exciting research area.

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“…For these dictionaries, domain experts are consulted to develop wordlists that cover the terms used by a specific population. For example, Smith, Wakeford, Cribbin, Barnett, and Hou (2020) developed an expert dictionary for ISIS vernacular after consulting 'terrorism and extremism experts from government and the security and defense sectors' (Smith et al, 2020, p.6). Figea, Kaati, and Scrivens (2016) developed one for racism, aggression, and worries on a white supremacy forum.…”

Section: Automatic Linguistic Threat Assessment and Grievance-fueled mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Grievance Dictionary: Understanding threatening language use

et al. 2021

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This paper introduces the Grievance Dictionary, a psycholinguistic dictionary that can be used to automatically understand language use in the context of grievance-fueled violence threat assessment. We describe the development of the dictionary, which was informed by suggestions from experienced threat assessment practitioners. These suggestions and subsequent human and computational word list generation resulted in a dictionary of 20,502 words annotated by 2318 participants. The dictionary was validated by applying it to texts written by violent and non-violent individuals, showing strong evidence for a difference between populations in several dictionary categories. Further classification tasks showed promising performance, but future improvements are still needed. Finally, we provide instructions and suggestions for the use of the Grievance Dictionary by security professionals and (violence) researchers.

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Detecting psychological change through mobilizing interactions and changes in extremist linguistic style

Abstract: Detecting psychological change through mobilizing interactions and changes in extremist linguistic style,

Cited by 30 publications

References 51 publications

“You wouldn’t celebrate September 11”: Testing online polarisation between opposing ideological camps on YouTube

“You wouldn’t celebrate September 11”: Testing online polarisation between opposing ideological camps on YouTube

A survey on extremism analysis using natural language processing: definitions, literature review, trends and challenges

The Grievance Dictionary: Understanding threatening language use

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