Online social media allows individuals to cluster around common interests - including hate. We show that tight-knit social clusters interlink to form resilient 'global hate highways' that bridge independent social network platforms, countries, languages and ideologies, and can quickly self-repair and rewire. We provide a mathematical theory that reveals a hidden resilience in the global axis of hate; explains a likely ineffectiveness of current control methods; and offers improvements. Our results reveal new science for networks-of-networks driven by bipartite dynamics, and should apply more broadly to illicit networks.
@article{arxiv.1811.03590,
title = {Social media cluster dynamics create resilient global hate highways},
author = {N. F. Johnson and R. Leahy and N. Johnson Restrepo and N. Velasquez and M. Zheng and P. Manrique},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.03590},
year = {2018}
}