Guest speaker: Ryan Scrivens
Ryan Scrivens is a Horizon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Project SOMEONE, hosted at Concordia University. He is also a Visiting Researcher at the VOX-Pol Network of Excellence, a Research Associate at the International CyberCrime Research Centre at Simon Fraser University, and the Associate Theses Research Editor of Perspectives on Terrorism.
Summary
Researchers have long explored how members of the radical right use the Internet to connect with like-minded individuals and build a collective identity by othering their perceived “threat”. Yet little is known about how this “us” versus “them” dynamic unfolds over time.
This presentation will show how a sentiment analysis-based algorithm that adapts traditional criminal career measures and semi-parametric group-based modeling can evaluate how users’ radical opinions and subsequent posting behaviours develop online.
Data was extracted from a sub-forum of the most visited white supremacy forum, Stormfront, and the sample included 124,058 posts made by 7,014 authors over 15 years. Key results will be highlighted, followed by a discussion of policy implications and future research.
Conférence présentée par le Centre international de criminologie comparée
