Predicting When Online Hate Will Turn Into Violence

Ever since reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation series as a teenager, I've been fascinated by the idea of using mathematics to predict large-scale social trends. That has turned out not to be possible at the level that Asimov was writing about, but people's behaviour can be mathematically modelled at a smaller scale. For example, how traffic responds to an accident on a freeway can be modelled using the mathematics of fluid dynamics.

British physicist, Neil Johnson, is using mathematics and physics to help understand how hate-filled discussions in online groups can boil over into real-world violence. 

Johnson believes these transformational shifts within collections of people, which bring individuals closer to a reckless act, are analogous to the phase transitions materials undergo upon changing their physical form. Familiar examples include the curdling of milk as it switches from liquid to solid, or the boiling of water as it changes from liquid to gas. If you place a pot of water on a lighted stove, figuring out which molecule will be the first to vaporize would be impossible (and pointless). That first molecule is no different from any other, except for being in the right place for making bubbles. What matters is knowing that the burner’s turned on — and realizing that if it’s kept on, more bubbles will rise to the surface. Matters can come to a boil in the human sphere as well, Johnson’s studies have indicated, if online hate groups are allowed to expand and fester without restraint.

Johnson recognized this pattern: He’d seen it many times during his regular academic studies in physics. As he and his colleagues reported in Physical Review Letters in 2018, the sudden appearance and expansion of pro-ISIS groups followed a progression perfectly described by gelation theory — an area of physics and chemistry that explains how liquids congeal, first into disparate clumps and then into a large cluster, or gel. The curdling of milk is, again, a familiar example. “I get a gallon from CVS, and it seems fine until one day big clumps appear out of nowhere,” Johnson notes. At that point, the process is irreversible, he adds. “You can’t uncurdle milk.”

Gelation theory is old hat in physics, but Johnson made the crucial observation that the process of milk coagulation can be characterized by the same kinds of equations that charted the upsurge of ISIS groups. Apparently, online extremism and curdling milk obey the same mathematical rules and exhibit the same exponential — and, hence, unruly — growth. Humans may not be particles, but in this case they can be just as predictable. 

I think he's on to something here. You only have to look at history to find examples of events, relatively minor in themselves. have caused sudden social transformations.