Understanding and detecting behavioral and ideological escalation online

Speakers: Dr. Emily Chiang & Dr. Ralph Morton

Abstract: Harmful online communities can support individuals in becoming more ideologically extreme and more skilled at offending. A key task for law-enforcement is to detect these various forms of escalation as a means of assessing potential threats posed by particular online groups. This task is, however, complicated by two issues: first, a lack of definitional consensus around related and overlapping terms including escalation, polarisation, radicalisation, grooming, extremism and terrorism (Schmidt, 2013), and second, a lack of formalised, empirically tested method for analysing and detecting various forms of escalation.In this talk, we present preliminary findings from ongoing project ADOBE (Analysing and Describing Online Behaviours around Escalation); a research project directly tackling these twin issues. We first report findings from a corpus-assisted analysis of academic and policy literature around escalation and related terms, exploring their uses and meanings across varied fields of study and addressing the question of whether and how we can provide some terminological clarity and consistency. Having reviewed strengths and weaknesses of previous approaches, we present an early descriptive model of our own form- and function-based linguistic framework for analysing escalation in online forum discourse. Using this framework we aim to identify the lexico-grammatical and pragmatic features that indicate ideological and behavioural escalation of members of a far-right extremist online forum.

References:

Schmid, A. (2013). Radicalisation, De-Radicalisation, Counter-Radicalisation: A Conceptual Discussion and Literature Review. Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism Studies 4. 10.19165/2013.1.02.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics