Anonymity, Membership-Length and Postage Frequency as Predictors of Extremist Language and Behaviour among Twitter Users
Sutch, Hollie and Carter, Pelham (2020) Anonymity, Membership-Length and Postage Frequency as Predictors of Extremist Language and Behaviour among Twitter Users. International Journal of Cyber Criminology, 13 (2). pp. 439-459. ISSN 0974-2891
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Abstract
The rise in participation of social media networks is accompanied with a corresponding rise in online extremism. The present research was carried out to ascertain whether anonymity, membership length and postage frequency are predictors of online extremism. A total of 205 Twitter accounts and 102,290 tweets were examined. To address the research question, both a corpus linguistic analysis (CLA) and content analysis (CA) were conducted. The former looked at extreme words associated with Islam and the latter looked at four types of extremist behaviour (extreme pro-social, extreme anti-social, extreme anti-social prejudicial biases and extreme radical behaviours). Keyness tests demonstrated that extreme words were most significantly associated with Twitter accounts with high anonymity, low membership length and low postage frequency. A series of multiple regressions found that anonymity significantly predicted four types of extremist behaviour. Membership length only predicted extreme anti-social behaviour and postage frequency did not display any significant predictive power for any of the four types of extremist behaviour. These results suggest that anonymity, membership length and postage frequency differ in terms of predicting extremist language and behaviour.
Item Type: | Article |
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Additional Information: | Accepted Feb 2020 but in 2019 dated issue |
Identification Number: | 10.5281/zenodo.3707789 |
Dates: | Date Event 31 December 2019 Accepted 29 February 2020 Published |
Uncontrolled Keywords: | Extremism; Anonymity; Membership length; Postage frequency; Corpus linguistics |
Subjects: | CAH04 - psychology > CAH04-01 - psychology > CAH04-01-01 - psychology (non-specific) CAH15 - social sciences > CAH15-01 - sociology, social policy and anthropology > CAH15-01-02 - sociology CAH19 - language and area studies > CAH19-01 - English studies > CAH19-01-07 - linguistics |
Divisions: | Faculty of Business, Law and Social Sciences > College of Psychology |
Depositing User: | Pelham Carter |
Date Deposited: | 17 Apr 2020 15:09 |
Last Modified: | 11 Jun 2024 13:03 |
URI: | https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/9128 |
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