Resumen de Ranking Right-Wing Extremist Social Media Profiles by Similarity to Democratic and Extremist Groups
Matthias Hartung, Roman Klinger, Franziska Schmidtke, Lars Vogel
Social media are used by an increasing number of political actors. A small subset of these is interested in pursuing extrem- ist motives such as mobilization, recruit- ing or radicalization activities. In order to counteract these trends, online providers and state institutions reinforce their mon- itoring efforts, mostly relying on manual workflows. We propose a machine learn- ing approach to support manual attempts towards identifying right-wing extremist content in German Twitter profiles. Based on a fine-grained conceptualization of right- wing extremism, we frame the task as rank- ing each individual profile on a continuum spanning different degrees of right-wing extremism, based on a nearest neighbour approach. A quantitative evaluation reveals that our ranking model yields robust per- formance (up to 0.81 F1 score) when being used for predicting discrete class labels. At the same time, the model provides plausi- ble continuous ranking scores for a small sample of borderline cases at the division of right-wing extremism and New Right political movements.
