Violent Extremism in the United States Monitor

ISD’s bi-monthly data snapshot provides a quantitative overview of key trends in US-based violent extremist activity online, providing an up-to-date picture of the evolving digital threat landscape for practitioners.

Data on the cross-platform online violent extremist ecosystem provides insights on the different risks across online spaces and where prevention efforts might be focused. Analysis of the evolving narratives espoused by US-based violent extremists enables practitioners to better understand potential entry points for helping individuals disengage from violence. And mapping the relationship between patterns in online US-based violent extremist activity and real-world developments and events can help guide the allocation of prevention resources.

Analysis is rooted in public data collected from over a thousand US-based violent extremist channels from a range of social media platforms, spanning across the ideological spectrum of US-based violent extremism (including racially or ethnically motivated and anti-government violent extremism). Each account has been manually vetted by multiple experts as engaging in clear violent extremist behavior, including engaging in unlawful extremist violence, glorifying foreign terrorist organizations or inciting targeted violence.

This research is focused exclusively on aggregated trends analysis, not monitoring of individuals or detection of specific threats, with stringent protections ensuring that all data is anonymized, and personally identifiable information is removed at the point of data collection. A full methodology is included in each report.

This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology Directorate, under Grant Award Number 23STFRG00021. Any opinions or conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology Directorate.