Online language of violent rioters displayed weak group affiliation preceding the U.S. Capitol Breach

The riot that occurred on January 6^th, 2021, at the Federal Capitol buildings represented a form of political violence rarely witnessed in the history of the United States. Thousands of people attended the riot, and many were criminally charged with violent and nonviolent offenses. Criminal case files provided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation contained social media posts made in anticipation of the riot, thus creating an unprecedented opportunity to assess linguistic indicators of future political violence. These data permitted the rare empirical exploration of why some individuals became violent when acting under the same pretext as their nonviolent peers. In the present study, individuals were divided into two groups: those who were charged with violent (n = 25) and nonviolent crimes (n = 55). Natural language analyses of their social media posts in the 3 months prior to January 6 identified that violent rioters used rhetoric which displayed weaker group affiliation. The violent rioters also used less analytical and more questioning language than their nonviolent counterparts. The findings indicate that violence during the U.S. Capitol Breach on January 6th was not an extension of zealous group identification, and that these rioters may have been unique in their motivations to engage in violent political action. This investigation included a small sample, and whether the language of those who were fortunate enough to evade penalty, or posted on encrypted social media networks, would adhere to the patterns in the current findings is unknown.