UNDERSTANDING THE PHASES AND THEMES OF COORDINATED ONLINE AGGRESSION ATTACKS

Several polarized online communities have emerged that use discussions on one social media site as a coordination point for like-minded individuals to launch hate messaging attacks against users on other sites. This chapter summarizes a decade of the authors’ research studying coordinated aggression originating from polarized online communities such as 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Board (/pol/), and manifesting themselves on other platforms such as YouTube or Zoom. The chapter presents a taxonomy of the phases that these attacks go through. Applying this taxonomy to data from 4chan shows that aggressors use a variety of tactics, some expected and some not. Often, aggressors make comment threads to entice engagement from others, report back on the attack, pile on the victim, and ultimately congratulate each other for a successful attack. A related result is that the phenomenon of Zoombombing, where attackers target online meetings, is primarily a crime of opportunity as opposed to elaborately planned events. The findings suggest that while understanding the nature of attacks and their victims is valuable, it is not enough. Aggressors as a group are much more complex than just the fruit of their labors, and this research has only begun to scratch the surface with respect to truly understanding socially coordinated aggression attacks on social media.