Crawling in the Dark – Perspectives on Threat Assessment in the Virtual Sphere.

Zentrale Fragestellung:

This chapter provides an overview of the opportunities and pitfalls of threat management in the virtual sphere. It contains approaches that can support threat managers in making large amounts of data available for threat analysis in a resource-efficient manner. Using the example of school shooting fan groups as well as Islamist and right-wing networks, we will illustrate how diverse virtual groups on social media platforms such as YouTube or Twitter can be in their structure and dynamics. Against this background, the potential of network analysis for threat management is highlighted, e.g. for detecting networks and individuals of Concern in a large dataset, identifying centralized networks of propagandists, or discovering the infiltration of legal social movements by violent forces. In the second part, we shift the focus from the structural to the linguistic level. On this level we focus on the analysis of communication on groups as well as on individual players in the virtual sphere. First, an overview of the possibilities of automated text analysis (e.g. emotion and sentiment analysis, Named Entity Recognition and LIWC) is given. We will discuss both explorative and model-driven research methods, present a number of tools and discuss the significance of these approaches for future- oriented threat management in the virtual sphere.