Preliminary Analysis on the Recruitment Process for Domestic Violent Extremist Groups

The rise of social media has coincided with the emergence of numerous domestic violent extremist groups with alt-right political ideologies in the United States and Europe. The current study analyzes patterns of communication in the Iron March dataset. Social network analysis was used to determine the most tightly connected users, and graph clustering shows the interactions between these influential users and other members of the forum. Our analysis shows a level of organization within the forum, and an adversarial approach to recruitment of new members, which was used to prevent infiltration by law enforcement and maintain the anonymity of participants. Users who completed the requirements for recruitment were permitted into other, more private, communication channels.