A Cyber-Psychological and Behavioral Approach to Online Radicalization

Online Radicalization And Radicals’ Use Of Cyberspace

Currently almost one-third of the world’s population uses smart phones (Statista, 2017), Facebook has more than 2 billion active users (Statista, 2017), and Twitter has 328 million monthly users (Statista, 2017). Considering the transformative characteristic of internet technologies, and the facilitating role of social media platforms for communication and influence, it seems unsurprising that radical groups embraced those opportunities for the same reasons as other groups (Aly, et al., 2017). If one construes terrorism as a type of communication (Schmid and de Graaf, 1982) or as a form of “communicative violence” (Aly, et al., 2017), then disseminating propaganda messages to attract the masses and gain sympathizers/new recruits are central to it. Hence, this aspect of internet technologies which is prone to abuse became a golden opportunity for radical groups that hinge on communication due to the aforementioned reasons.