Identifying Right-Wing Extremism in German Twitter Profiles: A Classification Approach

摘要

Social media platforms are used by an increasing number of extremist political actors for mobilization, recruiting or radicalization purposes. We propose a machine learning approach to support manual monitoring aiming at identifying right-wing extremist content in German Twitter profiles. We frame the task as profile classification, based on textual cues, traits of emotionality in language use, and linguistic patterns. A quantitative evaluation reveals a limited precision of 25% with a close-to-perfect recall of 95%. This leads to a considerable reduction of the workload of human analysts in detecting right-wing extremist users.