Unifying the Extremes: Developing a Unified Model for Detecting and Predicting Extremist Traits and Radicalization

The proliferation of ideological movements into extremist factions via social media has become a global concern. While radicalization has been studied extensively within the context of specific ideologies, our ability to accurately characterize extremism in more generalizable terms remains underdeveloped. In this paper, we propose a novel method for extracting and analyzing extremist discourse across a range of online ideological community forums. By focusing on verbal behavioral signatures of extremist traits, we develop a framework for quantifying extremism at both user and community levels. Our research identifies 11 distinct factors, which we term "The Extremist Eleven," as a generalized psychosocial model of extremism. Applying our method to various online communities, we demonstrate an ability to characterize ideologically diverse communities across the 11 extremist traits. We demonstrate the power of this method by analyzing user histories from members of the incel community. We find that our framework accurately predicts which users join the incel community up to 10 months before their actual entry with an AUC of > 0.6, steadily increasing to AUC ~ 0.9 three to four months before the event. Further, we find that upon entry into an ideological forum, the users tend to maintain their level of extremist traits within the community, while still remaining distinguishable from the general online discourse. Our findings contribute to the study of extremism by introducing a more holistic, cross-ideological approach that transcends traditional, trait-specific models.