Abstract
Online alt-right communities have emerged as primary hubs for radicalization, leveraging specific psychological vulnerabilities to propagate extremist ideologies. This study utilizes Social Network Analysis (SNA) combined with natural language processing (NLP) to examine how psychological vulnerabilities—such as relative deprivation, alienation, and a high need for cognitive closure—interact with extremist ideological narratives within prominent alt-right forum networks. Analyzing a corpus of 142,500 posts across 12,400 unique users over a 12-month period, we mapped user interaction networks and quantified thematic clusters of psychological distress and ideological convergence. The results indicate that highly central nodes (influential users) disproportionately deploy narratives of existential threat and collective victimhood, targeting peripheral, highly vulnerable users. Furthermore, we identified a significant correlation between user isolation (low network centrality) and subsequent adoption of violent extremist rhetoric, suggesting that social alienation accelerates ideological alignment. These findings provide empirical support for targeted, network-based forensic psychological interventions and offer a computational framework for risk assessment in digital environments.
