Nowadays, global extremist organizations are heavily utilizing Internet technologies to increase their abilities to influence the world. Studying those global extremist organizations’ Internet presence would allow us to better understand extremist organizations’ technical sophistication and their propaganda plans. However, due to the lack of efficient automatic methodologies, few previous researches have attempted to study the extremist organizations’ online presence on a global scale. In this work, we explore an integrated approach for collecting and analyzing extremist online presence. We employed automatic Web crawling techniques to build a comprehensive extremist Web collection which contains around 1.7 million multimedia Web documents. We then used a systematic content analysis tool called the Dark Web Attribute System to study these extremist organizations’ Internet usage from three perspectives: technical sophistication, content richness, and Web interactivity. We also conducted statistical analysis to cross-compare the technical sophistication and effectiveness of Web sites created by extremist groups from different regions. Our analysis results showed that all extremist organizations covered in this study demonstrated high level of technical sophistication in their Web presence but extremist organizations from different regions have different patterns in their Internet technology deployment and online content delivery. Our analysis results would help domain experts deepen their understanding on the global extremism movements and make better counterextremism measures on the Internet.
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Chen, H., Qin, J., Reid, E., Zhou, Y. (2008). Studying Global Extremist Organizations' Internet Presence Using the DarkWeb Attribute System. In: Chen, H., Reid, E., Sinai, J., Silke, A., Ganor, B. (eds) Terrorism Informatics. Integrated Series In Information Systems, vol 18. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-71613-8_12
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