Radical religious ideology or just new technology?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/conversion-via-twitter-westboro-baptist-church-megan-phelps-roper
The resilience of radical groups to the influence outside ideas is well-documented. Ranging from little-known cults to the Westboro Baptist Church, these groups all seem to follow remarkably similar strategies in surviving and propagating their ideologies, a daunting task in today’s digital world. While their ability to survive extensive contact with outside information and the world at large may seem surprising, if we analyze the ideologies behind Westboro Baptist Church as we might investigate the spread of a new technology, we can draw an interesting connection.
As mentioned in the article, the WBC encourages its members to communicate with those outside the church and to spread their message, but only after ingraining in them a strong distrust of the words of outsiders. Members are brought into a tightly-knit organization and strong ties to the outside world are discouraged. These patterns of behavior lead to the characterization of the WBC-membership as a highly dense cluster in the network of ideologies. As we learned in-class, dense clusters are notoriously effective at stopping the spread of new technologies, since their combined intra-connectedness and limited out-links prevents any attempts at conversion.
By framing their organization around the dense cluster model, the WBC and other groups can ensure a slow trickle of information out, possibly obtaining new recruits, while maintaining the levels of isolation and self-reinforcement required to retain their current members.
As a closing point, this analysis suggests that techniques used in cracking or mitigating the impact of dense clusters on technology spread, such as using nodes within the cluster as a starting point, may also be useful in breaking down the barriers between these outsider groups and the rest of society.