What is Ingroup

Various persuasion methods are used on the internet to sell products or ideas, as individuals are highly susceptible to believing much of what they access online. With about 4 billion netizens and counting, the internet provides wide access to gullible individuals. In this context, terrorist and extremist groups are witnessing an unabated increase in their membership and support, largely by employing deception-based persuasion techniques, inciting religious, regional, or racial sentiments. While religion-based Islamist terror is infamous for its large-scale adverse global impact, there are two other groups driven by the motives of racial and geographical hegemony that impact the world – the white supremacists and the Zionists. The chapter purports to achieve a three-part aim: (1) to examine these three groups in context of the deceptive information they put up online, (2) to analyze why such deceptive content has such an impact on the general public that it convinces them to resort to extremism, and (3) to discuss some methods of identifying and preventing online deception.