According to the researchers, social media posts mentioning logistics, operational planning, knowledge about weapons and avoiding law enforcement, as well as violent action, reportedly pointed to individuals that might subsequently perpetrate terror offenses — evidence of which, researchers suggest, was apparent up to four years before criminal action.

To make this determination, the team compared posts of convicted far-right terrorists with posts from those holding far-right extremist views who have not subsequently committed violence offline.

The researchers also noted that the discussion of far-right ideology and the expression of hateful views, surprisingly, decreased the likelihood that the user had mobilized to action. The researchers suggest that the increasing number of those turning to terrorism is motivated by “a fascination for violence, rather than ideological fanaticism”

"Our research shows that we can identify people on social media who go on to commit extremist action by picking up on posts that are about acquiring know-how and developing capability to commit terrorism. This method can help to identify people that are genuinely dangerous and likely to cause physical harm as opposed to those that are likely to contain their extremism to radical views and hate speech online," the researchers explained.

To reach this conclusion, the team spent a year gathering a unique database of more than 200,000 social media posts from 2011 to 2019. The posts were authored by 26 individuals convicted of terrorism-related offenses and 48 people who had shared extremist content on far-right forums, but who had not been convicted.

The team believes that the technology could one day be a tool to help law enforcement analyze risk within social networks.

An article detailing the team’s work, “Online Signals of Extremist Mobilization,” appears in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.