Media Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
Sci Rep. 2013;3:1544. doi: 10.1038/srep01544.
Violent extremist groups are currently making intensive use of Internet fora for recruitment to terrorism. These fora are under constant scrutiny by security agencies, private vigilante groups, and hackers, who sometimes shut them down with cybernetic attacks. However, there is a lack of experimental and formal understanding of the recruitment dynamics of online extremist fora and the effect of strategies to control them. Here, we utilize data on ten extremist fora that we collected for four years to develop a data-driven mathematical model that is the first attempt to measure whether (and how) these external attacks induce extremist fora to self-regulate. The results suggest that an increase in the number of groups targeted for attack causes an exponential increase in the cost of enforcement and an exponential decrease in its effectiveness. Thus, a policy to occasionally attack large groups can be very efficient for limiting violent output from these fora.
暴力极端组织目前正在密集利用互联网论坛招募恐怖分子。这些论坛受到安全机构、私人义务警员组织和黑客的持续监控，他们有时会通过网络攻击将其关闭。然而，对于在线极端主义论坛的招募动态以及控制这些论坛的策略的效果，缺乏实验和正式的理解。在这里，我们利用四年时间收集的十个极端主义论坛的数据，开发了一个数据驱动的数学模型，这是首次尝试衡量（以及如何衡量）这些外部攻击是否会促使极端主义论坛进行自我监管。结果表明，针对攻击目标的群体数量的增加会导致执法成本呈指数级增加，而其效果呈指数级下降。因此，偶尔攻击大型群体的政策对于限制这些论坛的暴力输出非常有效。
