White nationalists and self-identified Nazi sympathizers located mostly in the US use Twitter with “relative impunity” and often have far more followers than militant groups, a study released yesterday found.
Eighteen prominent white nationalist accounts examined in the study, including the American Nazi Party, have seen a sharp increase in Twitter followers to a total of more than 25,000, up from about 3,500 in 2012, according to the study by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.
The study’s findings contrast with declining influence on Twitter’s service for the Islamic State (IS) group amid crackdowns that have targeted the militant group, according to earlier research by report author J.M. Berger and the findings of other counterextremism experts and government officials.
“White nationalists and Nazis outperformed ISIS in average friend and follower counts by a substantial margin,” the report said, using another acronym for IS.
“Nazis had a median follower count almost eight times greater than ISIS supporters, and a mean count more than 22 times greater,” it said.
While Twitter has waged an aggressive campaign to suspend IS users — the company last month said in a blog post that it had shut down 360,000 accounts for threatening or promoting what it defined as terrorist acts since the middle of last year — Berger said in his report that “white nationalists and Nazis operate with relative impunity.”
A Twitter spokesman declined to comment in advance of the release of the study. Reuters was unable to independently verify its findings.
The report comes as Twitter faces scrutiny of its content removal policies. It has long been under pressure to crack down on militant groups and their supporters, and the problem of harassment gained renewed attention in July after actress Leslie Jones briefly quit Twitter in the face of abusive comments.
Berger said in an interview that Twitter and other companies such as Facebook faced added difficulties in enforcing standards against white nationalist groups because they are less cohesive than IS networks and present greater free speech complications.
The data collected, which included analysis of tweets of selected accounts and their followers, represents a fraction of the white nationalist presence on Twitter and was insufficient to estimate the overall online size of the groups, the report said.
Accounts examined in the study possessed a strong affinity for US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, a prolific Twitter user who has been accused of retweeting accounts associated with white nationalism dozens of times.
Three of the top 10 hashtags used most frequently by the data set of users studied were related to Trump, according to the report, titled Nazis vs. ISIS on Twitter. Only #whitegenocide was more popular than Trump-related hashtags, the report said.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
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