Network analysis of anti-muslim groups on Facebook

Abstract

Islamophobic attitudes and overt acts of hostility toward Muslims in the United States are increasingly commonplace. The goal of this research is to begin to understand how anti-Muslim political groups use the Facebook social network to build their own online communities, and to investigate crossover with other far-right political ideologies, such as anti-immigrant or white nationalist groups. We used the public Facebook Graph API to create a large dataset of 700,204 members of 1,870 Facebook groups spanning 10 different far-right ideologies during the time period June 2017–March 2018. We then applied social network analysis techniques to discover which groups and ideologies shared members with anti-Muslim groups during this period. Our results show that anti-Muslim groups serve as an “ideological center” for several other categories of far-right extremism.