Joshua Cloudy examines risk factors for joining extremist groups

Joshua Cloudy recalled the first independent study he completed while at working as a Ph.D. student at Texas Tech University. The project, completed in December of 2020, described how he believed niche social media applications, such as Parler, in combination with mainstream social media, are primed to lead to mass mobilized political extremism.

 A month later, Cloudy woke up to the news that the United States Capitol in D.C. was under attack. The reporting from publications like The Washington Post and some academic journals, Cloudy said, suggested that both niche and mainstream platforms were a large organizing center for political extremist groups. The riot eventually gave Cloudy direction to take his dissertation.

“I was curious what kind of people would be drawn into these online communities that, maybe explicitly or implicitly, were willing to use violent methods,” he said. “Most extremists, most terrorists, tend to be relatively normal in a psychological sense. If it’s regular, normal people, what sort of things are likely to stand out about them?”

Cloudy, an assistant professor in Grady College’s Department of Advertising and Public Relations, would adapt his dissertation on political mobilization into a recently published exploratory research article that identified several risk profiles for recruitment into online extremist groups.  

Determining Risk Profiles

Through conducting this experiment and writing the paper, Cloudy found the existence of three risk profiles (low, moderate and high) to identify a person’s willingness to be drawn into violent online groups. According to the study, those in the high-risk profile appear to be younger, more likely to be male, less likely to be white and have a higher income. They also tended to consume more news generally and from more divided partisan sources.

Cloudy’s work indicates that the biggest difference between the type of person willing to join these extremist groups is how willing or accepting they are of violence.

 “There is a growing body of work that suggests political polarization, while it’s problematic in a lot of ways, may not be the thing to worry about in terms of political violence,” he said. “It may be that prohibition against violence that doesn’t exist, and being really obsessive about your cause or ideology.”

He also found that certain traits such as psychopathy, sadism and obsessive passion were key factors in determining someone’s willingness to use political violence. However, demonstrating these conditions does not mean someone will become a political extremist outright; it just means the severity of these traits could lead them to join these groups.

“These measures are subclinical, meaning these aren’t the type of people who you might think of on an episode of ‘Criminal Minds’,” he said. “This is not someone who’s necessarily doing physical torture, but they might enjoy mocking people. They might get pleasure out of, or maybe they like, violent sports like UFC.”

The experiment focused on the people who are likely to join radical extremist groups. In the manipulation, Cloudy took the role of the group leader. He wrote the fabricated online posts based on messages from real-world extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and Redneck Revolt.

“I looked up a bunch of different groups and messaging from both violent and nonviolent groups,” he said. “I sort of co-opted the role of [Charles] Manson or [Nick] Fuentes, in this case, trying to see which type of people ‘bite,’ so to speak.”

Identifying and Preventing Threats

Though Cloudy’s intended audience is largely academics studying political mobilization, he hopes his work might be useful for those working in counterterrorism or the Department of Homeland Security to identify potential threats early.

The process to join an extremist group, Cloudy said, is not as simple as to “just walk into a door.”

There are often multiple layers people go through before they join these extremist groups and become radicalized. The research detailed a story of a person recruited by the Proud Boys of Wisconsin after seeing messages from the group online and finding a public Discord server. He was then invited to a private server on the app and eventually had a private in-person meeting before becoming a formal member.

“Sometimes people are self-radicalizing, sometimes people are radicalizing through groups, but it oftentimes is slow and not obvious,” Cloudy said.

Cloudy hopes to continue researching factors that lead people into online extremism, focusing more on ways to prevent and remedy the psychological conditions that lead people to join them in the first place.

He believes that this paper and the next phase of his research will be important for creating ways to stop people from joining radicalized extremist groups before it is too late.

“There are plenty of opportunities throughout to intervene, it’s just a matter of knowing when, where and with whom,” he said.

Author: Sam Tupper, samuel.tupper@uga.edu