Papers › City riots fed by transnational and trans-topic web-of-influence
City riots fed by transnational and trans-topic web-of-influence
Akshay Verma, Richard Sear, Nicholas J. Restrepo, Neil F. Johnson
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
The sudden emergence of large-scale riots in otherwise unconnected cities across the UK in summer 2024 came as a shock for both government officials and citizens. Irrespective of these riots' specific trigger, a key question is how the capacity for such widespread city rioting might be foreseen through some precursor behavior that flags an emerging appetite for such rioting at scale. Here we show evidence that points toward particular online behavior which developed at scale well ahead of the riots, across the multi-platform landscape of hate/extremist communities. Our analysis of detailed multi-platform data reveals a web-of-influence that existed well before the riots, involving online hate and extremism communities locally, nationally, and globally. This web-of-influence fed would-be rioters in each city mainly through video platforms. This web-of-influence has a persistent resilience -- and hence still represents a significant local, national, and international threat in the future -- because of its feedback across regional-national-international scales and across topics such as immigration; and its use of multiple lesser-known platforms that put it beyond any single government or platform's reach. Going forward, our findings mean that if city administrators coordinate with each other across local-national-international divides, they can map this threat as we have done here and initiate deliberation programs that might then soften such pre-existing extremes at scale, perhaps using automated AI-based technology.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections