Reading the post-riot posts: how we traced far-right radicalisation across 51,000 Facebook messages

Tracing profiles of those charged with online offences in summer 2024 helped us map a thriving social ecosystem trading far-right sentiment and political disillusionmentFar-right Facebook groups are engine of radicalisation in UK, data investigation suggestsInside the everyday Facebook networks where far-right ideas growMore than 1,100 people have been charged in connection to the summer 2024 riots. A small number of them were charged for offences related to their online activity.Their jail sentences – which ranged from 12 weeks to seven years – became a flashpoint for online criticism. The people behind the posts were variously defended, held up as a cause célèbre and cast as “political prisoners”; their posts minimised and repeated; their prosecution misrepresented as an attack on free speech (the majority of those prosecuted for online offences faced charges of stirring up racial hatred).Accuracy (percentage of correctly classified instances): 94.7%.Precision (percentage of times the True labels assigned by GPT are correct): 79.5.Recall (percentage of instances classified as True by the humans that were also classified as True by GPT): 86.1%.F1 (a single percentage that combines precision and recall, higher when GPT both finds the True cases and avoids false alarms): 82.6%. Continue reading…Technology | The GuardianRead More