ExtremismNetwork-Enabled Anarchy: Excerpts from the Report

Published 16 September 2020

The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a non-partisan organization, developed a tool to analyze extremist discourse on social media, and earlier this year used it to analyze the growing threat posed by the far-right, anti-government Boogaloo Bois movement. NCRI has now released a study of the increasingly more extreme social media discourse by leftist extremists.

The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a non-partisan organization, developed a tool to analyze extremist discourse on social media, and earlier this year used it to analyze the growing threat posed by the far-right, anti-government Boogaloo Bois movement. “Our research was the first to provide an in-depth characterization of the emerging threats against police by the extreme libertarian-anarchist movement, the Boogaloo; our assessment proved accurate, with terror attacks against law enforcement appearing only months after the report, including fatalities,” NCRI notes.

NCRI, the affiliated partners of which include the Anti-Defamation League and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, has now released a study of the increasingly more extreme social media discourse by leftist extremists.

“To date, though there have been anecdotal claims of similarly organized, violent anti-fascist and anarcho-socialist extremism, those claims have not been clearly supported by evidence. We thus deployed the same mixed computational/open source investigation approaches that we used to uncover threats of libertarian anarchist violence in order to determine whether we could detect potential threats of anarcho-socialist extremism,” NCRI says.

Here are excerpts from the report:

Introduction and Overview
Three tactics characteristic of extremist online communities have allowed them to become influential in recent years:

1) they use memes as propaganda [1]

2) they employ sophisticated communication networks for both planning and recruiting, making use of both fringe and private, online forums [2], and

3) they organize militias, and inspire lone wolf actors for violent action [3, 4].

On social media, memes—images, videos, and/or slogans—permit extremists to plant hateful [5], anti-Semitic [6] and/or revolutionary [7] ideas in the public eye. Often, they are disguised with humor or through using coded language, and originate in online forums [5, 6]. The somewhat private nature of these forums allows extremist groups to use them to shield themselves from view while sharing extremist ideas and coordinating action. [8]. Finally, many extremist movements, from radical Jihadi to libertarian-anarchists, now use social media memes and other propaganda to recruit for militias with apocalyptic and revolutionary ideology (such as global Jihad or apocalyptic confrontations with police) [3, 9]. Organized violent networks that support these ideas generate both lone-wolf [10] and cell-like [11] attacks against law enforcement and the general public.