Related papers: Generalized Gelation Theory describes Human Online…
A better understanding of how support evolves online for undesirable behaviors such as extremism and hate, could help mitigate future harms. Here we show how the highly irregular growth curves of groups supporting two high-profile extremism…
Support for extremist entities - whether from the far right, or far left - often manages to survive globally online despite significant external pressure, and may ultimately inspire violent acts by individuals having no obvious prior…
Society faces a fundamental global problem of understanding which individuals are currently developing strong support for some extremist entity such as ISIS (Islamic State) -- even if they never end up doing anything in the real world. The…
The 'out of the blue' nature of recent terror attacks and the diversity of apparent motives, highlight the importance of understanding the online trajectories that individuals follow prior to developing high levels of extremist support.…
Recent terrorist attacks carried out on behalf of ISIS on American and European soil by lone wolf attackers or sleeper cells remind us of the importance of understanding the dynamics of radicalization mediated by social media communication…
There is a significant amount of online human activity which is either clandestine or illicit in nature, and hence where individuals operate under fear of exposure or capture. Yet there is little theoretical understanding of what models…
We show that the eclectic "Boogaloo" extremist movement that is now rising to prominence in the U.S., has a hidden online mathematical order that is identical to ISIS during its early development, despite their stark ideological,…
I present a unified discussion of several recently published results concerning the escalation, timing and severity of violent events in human conflicts and global terrorism, and set them in the wider context of real-world and cyber-based…
Many models have been proposed to explain opinion formation in groups of individuals; most of these models study opinion propagation as the interaction between nodes/agents in a social network. Opinion formation is a complex process and a…
The proliferation of ideological movements into extremist factions via social media has become a global concern. While radicalization has been studied extensively within the context of specific ideologies, our ability to accurately…
The rapid spread of radical ideologies in recent years has led to a worldwide string of terrorist attacks. Understanding how extremist tendencies germinate, develop, and drive individuals to action is important from a cultural standpoint,…
In (Deffuant et al., 2002), we proposed a simple model of opinion dynamics, which we used to simulate the influence of extremists in a population. Simulations were run without any specific interaction structure and varying the simulation…
Today's society faces widening disagreement and conflicts among constituents with incompatible views. Escalated views and opinions are seen not only in radical ideology or extremism but also in many other scenes of our everyday life. Here…
The ease of use of the Internet has enabled violent extremists such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to easily reach large audience, build personal relationships and increase recruitment. Social media are primarily based on the…
We present a many-body theory that explains and reproduces recent observations of population polarization dynamics, is supported by controlled human experiments, and addresses the controversy surrounding the Internet's impact. It predicts…
In this paper, we have initiated an attempt to develop and understand the driving mechanisms that underlie fourth-generation warfare. We have undertaken this from a perspective of endeavoring to understand the drivers of these events from a…
The global chaos caused by the 19 July 2024 technology meltdown highlights the need for a theory of what large-scale cohesive behaviors -- dangerous or desirable -- could suddenly emerge from future systems of interacting humans, machinery…
Increasing levels of far-right extremist violence have generated public concern about the spread of radicalization in the United States. Previous research suggests that radicalized individuals are destabilized by various environmental (or…
An existing model of opinion dynamics on an adaptive social network is extended to introduce update policy heterogeneity, representing the fact that individual differences between social animals can affect their tendency to form, and be…
Polarization is a well-documented phenomenon across a wide range of social issues. However, prevailing theories often compartmentalize the examination of herding behavior and opinion convergence within different contexts. In this study, we…