Come one, come all: individual-level diversity among anti-fascists
In: Dynamics of asymmetric conflict, Band 15, Heft 1, S. 78-93
ISSN: 1746-7594
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In: Dynamics of asymmetric conflict, Band 15, Heft 1, S. 78-93
ISSN: 1746-7594
In: Dynamics of asymmetric conflict, Band 14, Heft 2, S. 209-224
ISSN: 1746-7594
In: Terrorism and political violence, S. 1-17
ISSN: 1556-1836
In: Policy & internet, Band 12, Heft 1, S. 109-138
ISSN: 1944-2866
The advent of the Internet inadvertently augmented the functioning and success of violent extremist organizations. Terrorist organizations like the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) use the Internet to project their message to a global audience. The majority of research and practice on web‐based terrorist propaganda uses human coders to classify content, raising serious concerns such as burnout, mental stress, and reliability of the coded data. More recently, technology platforms and researchers have started to examine the online content using automated classification procedures. However, there are questions about the robustness of automated procedures, given insufficient research comparing and contextualizing the difference between human and machine coding. This article compares output of three text analytics packages with that of human coders on a sample of one hundred nonindexed web pages associated with ISIS. We find that prevalent topics (e.g., holy war) are accurately detected by the three packages whereas nuanced concepts (Lone Wolf attacks) are generally missed. Our findings suggest that naïve approaches of standard applications do not approximate human understanding, and therefore consumption, of radicalizing content. Before radicalizing content can be automatically detected, we need a closer approximation to human understanding.