City riots fed by transnational and trans-topic web-of-influence

TL;DR

This paper addresses how city-scale riots in the UK during 2024 can be foreshadowed by online ecosystem dynamics across multiple platforms. It develops a large-scale mapping of hate/extremism communities, focusing on Patriotic Alternative, to reveal a trans-national and trans-topic web-of-influence that predates the riots. The analysis demonstrates how city-based PA nodes connect through low-moderation platforms to national and international hubs, creating feedback loops that could mobilize localized unrest. The work highlights the need for cross-city coordination among authorities and platforms, and discusses AI-assisted strategies to mitigate extremism without broad censorship. The findings offer a framework for proactive monitoring and coordinated responses to reduce the risk of future hate-driven events.

Abstract

The sudden emergence of large-scale riots in otherwise unconnected cities across the UK in summer 2024 came as a shock for both government officials and citizens. Irrespective of these riots' specific trigger, a key question is how the capacity for such widespread city rioting might be foreseen through some precursor behavior that flags an emerging appetite for such rioting at scale. Here we show evidence that points toward particular online behavior which developed at scale well ahead of the riots, across the multi-platform landscape of hate/extremist communities. Our analysis of detailed multi-platform data reveals a web-of-influence that existed well before the riots, involving online hate and extremism communities locally, nationally, and globally. This web-of-influence fed would-be rioters in each city mainly through video platforms. This web-of-influence has a persistent resilience -- and hence still represents a significant local, national, and international threat in the future -- because of its feedback across regional-national-international scales and across topics such as immigration; and its use of multiple lesser-known platforms that put it beyond any single government or platform's reach. Going forward, our findings mean that if city administrators coordinate with each other across local-national-international divides, they can map this threat as we have done here and initiate deliberation programs that might then soften such pre-existing extremes at scale, perhaps using automated AI-based technology.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: A: Conceptual diagram of how communities in the global hate network link to each other and to communities outside the network over time. B: The broader hate network's many connections to the Patriotic Alternative's local and national channels. Both A and B indicate snippets of the (huge) hate universe that we collected, as discussed in Sec. 2.
• Figure 2: The 'City Amplification Network' (data aggregated for simplicity from 2020 to just before the riots in summer 2024). This visualization shows how Patriotic Alternative (PA) operates online communities across various cities and regions in the UK, which feed information to the major PA nodes and which in turn are connected to trans-national and trans-topical nodes.
• Figure 3: Impact of Node Removal on Patriotic Alternative Infrastructure. These plots compare the effects of removing the National Patriotic Alternative nodes to removing nodes at random, through the impact of this removal on 4 key metrics: Largest Component Size, Average Path Length, Diameter, and Algebraic Connectivity. When National Patriotic Alternative nodes are removed, there is a significant impact on the connectivity of the hate/extremism network. In contrast, removing nodes at random does not significantly affect the overall connectivity of the network, indicating that its infrastructure is resilient to attacks of these types.