Cross-Ideological Hallmarks of Extremist Rhetoric in Social Media

Hasan Omarzae, Björn Gambäck


Abstract
The paper investigates to what extent linguistic features, primarily emotional and affective signals, serve as a common denominator in the online texts of various extremist groups. Examining social media data from multiple sources, this research focuses on ideologies such as far-right, jihadist, and various manosphere subgroups. Key results demonstrate distinct emotional profiles across ideologies, with "disgust" emerging as a dominant emotion in many extremist discourses, while "joy" is most prominent in the analyzed religious extremist content. Statistically significant dissimilarities in emotional expression patterns were confirmed, allowing for differentiation between ideological groups. Classifiers, particularly the DeBERTa model, demonstrated a strong capability to reliably distinguish between extremist groups based solely on linguistic characteristics.
Anthology ID:
2026.woah-1.17
Volume:
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Agostina Calabrese, Thomas Davidson, Christine de Kock, Urja Khurana, Marta Marchiori Manerba, Paloma Piot, Zeerak Talat
Venues:
WOAH | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
192–203
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.woah-1.17/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hasan Omarzae and Björn Gambäck. 2026. Cross-Ideological Hallmarks of Extremist Rhetoric in Social Media. In Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH), pages 192–203, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cross-Ideological Hallmarks of Extremist Rhetoric in Social Media (Omarzae & Gambäck, WOAH 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.woah-1.17.pdf
Supplementarymaterial:
 2026.woah-1.17.SupplementaryMaterial.zip