US Domestic Extremist Groups on the Web: Link and Content Analysis

Although US domestic extremist and hate groups might not be as well-known as some international groups, they nevertheless pose a significant threat to homeland security. Increasingly, these groups are using the Internet as a tool for facilitating recruitment, linking with other extremist groups, reaching global audiences, and spreading hate materials that encourage violence and terrorism. A study of semiautomated methodologies to capture and organize domestic extremist Web site data revealed interorganizational structures and cluster affinities that coincided with both domain expert knowledge and earlier manual research.