This project is a 24-month initiative led by the institute for strategic dialogue (ISD) designed to provide up-to-date trends analysis around the rapidly shifting domestic violent extremist threat…

This 24-month, $1,249,621 project grant awarded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate under the Homeland Security, Research, Testing, Evaluation, and Demonstration of Technologies program (CFDA 97.108) is designed to provide in-depth analysis of the rapidly evolving domestic violent extremist threat landscape in the United States. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a woman-owned non-profit organization, will leverage novel computational social science methods and digital ethnographic research to systematically track online extremist tactics, techniques, and trends. This work aims to inform evidence-based policy responses and intervention strategies at the national and local levels, with a focus on understanding the intersection of international and domestic violent extremism. The analysis will cover a range of extremist ideologies, including racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism and anti-government extremism, and will be made publicly accessible to support practitioners, policymakers, and the general public.

This project is a 24-month initiative led by the institute for strategic dialogue (ISD) designed to provide up-to-date trends analysis around the rapidly shifting domestic violent extremist threat landscape in the united states, to inform evidence-based policy making and practitioner responses to a new generation of threats. This project will apply novel computational social science methods to effectively understand the evolving strategies and tactics deployed by violent extremists online to build movements, broadcast violent messaging, target individuals and communities, and radicalize individuals towards violent action. With a primary focus on US domestic extremism threats, the research will be geared towards informing policy responses and interventions at a national and local level, including by drawing on policy and practitioner networks established by ISD. This will be further enhanced through analysis of transnational violent extremist dynamics impacting the US, drawing on datasets analyzing online violent extremist tactics, techniques and procedures across north america, europe, and australasia. Analysis will draw on isds deep subject matter expertise, as well as beam, an award-winning technology which leverages cutting edge natural language processing to track information threats, to develop systematized insights on online violent extremism trends and their offline impacts. Our methodological approach will draw on large-scale data analytics across platforms with comparable open-source data access (including facebook, twitter, instagram, reddit, telegram, youtube, as well as a range of ALT-tech services), and digital ethnographic research of violent extremism. This work is geared towards transparency, and insights generated through this project will be made publicly accessible and will be rooted in analysis of public social media activity. This analysis will be cross-ideological, tracking violent extremism wherever IT manifests, including racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVES), anti-government violent extremists, and the intersection between international and domestic violent extremism. This project focuses on generating informative analysis around violent extremist mobilization and radicalization to violence for the public, interventions practitioners, and national and local policy makers, and is not an exercise in intelligence gathering. All insights from this work will be anonymized and presented in aggregate, and no personally identifiable information will be disseminated as a result of this work. Trends analysis will focus exclusively on activity which leads to violence, IT will not focus on individuals or look to detect specific threats, with stringent firewalls ensuring the safeguarding of constitutionally protected speech. ISD will not use this work to engage social media platforms around content removal. Through a series of regular reports and convenings, the project will be designed around translating research findings into actionable knowledge products, including for international, federal and local policy partners, violence prevention practitioners, the research community, as well as the general public. This will include partnership with the DHS-funded prevention practitioners network and strong cities network as key dissemination partners for insights on the scale and the nature of the violent extremist threat, as well as the development of action-oriented resources for those working on prevention and intervention strategies.