Political violence monitoring tool: pvmt
About our new tool
As election day approaches, there are multiple unforeseen events that can happen as a consequence of the results of the voting and the refusal to accept a peaceful transition of power. Civil conflict, on both small and large scales, is imminent.
Neveragaintech aims to stay on top of politically motivated threats to safety and security from extreme ideologists and militant groups. The following outlines our methodologies, and what the monitoring procedures will look like in the days leading up to the election, during the election, and the aftermath of the election,
ADDRESSING PRIVACY
To Clarify:
We will strictly accept responses that deal with threats circulating in the public domain only-meaning threats made by anonymized profiles on Reddit, TheDonald.Win, 8kun, 4chan, Parler, Gab, Telegram.
We will not and cannot accept tips made about threats in private conversations, settings, or groups. Meaning Instagram DMs, screenshots of private social media profiles, or texts cannot be accepted via this forum as we adhere to our strict privacy standards. In that case, please reach out directly to local law enforcement and federal/local FBI tip lines for the appropriate course of action.
Neveragaintech's goal with this tool is to strictly support law enforcement efforts in preventing future attacks as an independently established organization. We are not responsible for anything further than the threat reporting process-this includes preventing actualizations of threats.
Methodology
What are we monitoring?
As a continuation of our work from previous years, we have been continually monitoring alt-right and alt-left sites that are populated by fringe communities. We will not specify them for our own safety and privacy, The channels on these websites are filled with extremist rhetoric and hate based ideologies specifically entrenched in antisemitism, sexism, racism, and conspiration against the United States government and its citizens.
How are we monitoring them?
We have built secure crawlers that can download up to hundreds of thousands of posts within 30 seconds. We classify each of these posts as being:
- Non-Offensive (1): regular, non-threatening, non-harmful language common to the website.
- Conspiracy (2): Theorizing about specific events and the perpetrators of them. Also, non-threatening.
- Foul Language (3): Words that can be categorized on any other website as hateful or harmful against a specific minority, but on these websites are considered common syntax, such as (TW), nigger, jew, faggot, gook, kike, chink, etc.
- Conspiracy (4): Callings at large to groups of people to "prepare" for an unforeseen and often negative event in the future. Callings to spread QAnon conspiracy theories, so-called "red pills", and right wing propaganda on more available media platforms.
- Hate (4): This category delves into more dangerous semantics. Callings to eradicate or exterminate groups at large. Contains large elements of white supremacy and "superior race" theory. Threats of rape and sexual assault against women-containing elements of incel theory.
- Threat (5): Tangible calls to action regarding any of the aforementioned categories. Dictated by vocabulary such as "will" and "going to".
What you can expect:
Over the next couple of weeks, we will update this section with the general trends we observe from our monitoring, specific examples of the aforementioned categories to develop further understanding, any large indicators of mass violence or calls to mass violence in specific locations or cities, and for a long term scale, how presidential rhetoric around election results can directly deter or instigate political violence.
Some great resources to refer to:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/10/27/why-the-risk-of-election-violence-is-high/
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/political-violence-inequality-us-election
monitoring as polls close
General Observation:
- Activity on the sites has been suspended or somewhat stalled either due to a network outage or anticipation for the election results.
- Predict that activity will resume again once election results begin to finalize.
- Emphasizing once again that calls to mass violence will be sporadic, reactionary, and will emanate from extremist alignments across the board, not one specific category.
- In the case of the latter category, prediction and detection efforts will not be as fruitful. We will likely resume monitoring the aftermath to understand how rhetoric changes before, during, and after pivotal political events.