Representation of Radical Communities in Russian Social Media: Content Specifics and Activity Index

Radical communities are a habitual part of society as a whole. For a long time, the concepts of radicals and extremists were interpreted almost as synonyms. Currently, the key conception of radicalization is that it is an expression of the process leading to extremism, and radicalization is understood as the physical, institutional, cultural violence of one social group against another. With the advent of the Internet, radical online communities have sprung up. Extremist communities are communities that have radicalized into violence. However, at present, in many countries, such communities are banned and exist illegally, camouflaged under ordinary radicals, that is, those in the process of radicalization. The aim of this research is to study the distribution of radicalization activity of the right, left, and Islamist radical online communities by region, clarifying the leading topics of radicalization within each of these areas. The initial question is the question of the hegemonic topics of radical online communities within various ideological sects in Russia. The data for the study were messages in radical groups on the social network VKontakte. The research design was based on the identification of radical content and its carriers using the snowball method and the natural language processing method. In the found groups, an automatic clustering of content was carried out in order to identify the leading topics for all types of groups. The final step was the indexing of the activity in order to determine its distribution by region. The ollowing results were obtained. (1) Current vectors of radicalization of the right, left, and Islamist radicals were identified. At present, radicalization is taking place in the following directions: the right - the continuing practices of hatred; Islamists - the truth and purity of faith; the left - consolidation in order to ensure their own party representation in political processes. (2) Comparison of activity indices showed the insularity of activity in each sect across the country. (3) Ideological forms of radicalization prevail in comparison with the religious (Islamic) ones with the extreme right-wing opinions and sentiments in the lead. (4) Outside of traditionally Islamic regions, the generation of radical Islamic content is large in Moscow and Yugra (Western Siberia) - regions with a large number of migrants. The insularity of radicalization, its thematic heterogeneity, and a strict ban on hate speech suggest a splitting of the conventional model of “radicalization toward extremism” into many independent streams with different, including non-violent and constructive, outcomes pertaining to radicalization “ into” civic activism, single-issue radicalism focused on climate, animal rights, body policies, immunization (“antivaxxers”), the use of nuclear energy (“antinukers”), green activism, etc. A comprehensive study of these trends can form the basis for further understanding of the process of radicalization in the new turbulent world.

Keywords

Authors

References