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
Additional Information: Accepted Feb 2020 but in 2019 dated issue
Identification Number: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3707789
Dates:
DateEvent
31 December 2019Accepted
29 February 2020Published
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 > School of Social Sciences > Dept. Psychology
Depositing User: Pelham Carter
Date Deposited: 17 Apr 2020 15:09
Last Modified: 09 Oct 2023 10:24
URI: https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/9128

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