By Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat and Luke Barnes October 2025 Against a backdrop of escalating political violence and deepening polarization in theUnited States, a new HFG-supported report from the NYU Stern Center for Businessand Human Rights examines how extremist actors across the ideological spectrum areexploiting digital platforms to respond to, amplify, and glorify violence. Drawing on open-source intelligence collected between March and September 2025,the report Digital Aftershocks: Online Mobilization and Violence in the United Statestraces how far-right, far-left, violent Islamist, and nihilistic violent extremist communities use cross-platform strategies to recruit followers, justify violence, andsustain propaganda networks. “This cross-ideological scope hopefully allows us to break through the partisan framingthat tends to derail serious policy discussion, and to make principled, rights-respectingrecommendations grounded in observable behavior” said co-author Mariana OlaizolaRosenblat, Policy Advisor on Technology and Law at NYU Stern. The report is part of HFG’s Violence, Politics & Democracy initiative, a multi-year projectexamining how these phenomena interact in mature democracies to understand betterand counter political violence and other forces that damage democratic norms andinstitutions, imperiling the safety of citizens. Read or download the report (PDF)
By Paul M. Barrett September 2024 Based on a review of more than 400 social science studies, a new HFG-funded report from the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights details how social media use can enable or contribute to political strife. Amid a volatile election season, the report, ‘We Want You To Be A Proud Boy’: How Social Media Facilitates Political Intimidation and Violence, outlines the steps social media companies like Facebook, TikTok and Telegram can take to reduce their contribution to increasing levels of political intimidation and violence across the U.S. and around the world. “While social media platforms aren’t solely to blame for increasing political strife, they often contribute to the growing problem,” said Paul Barrett, the report’s primary author and deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. The report is part of HFG’s Violence, Politics & Democracy initiative, a multi-year project examining how these phenomena interact in mature democracies to understand better and counter political violence and other forces that damage democratic norms and institutions, imperiling the safety of citizens. Read or download the report (PDF)
By Randolph Roth May 2024 The recent rise in American homicide rates did not start in 2020 with a spike during COVID. Homicide actually began to increase in 2015, reversing more than 20 years of declining or stable rates. In this report, Randolph Roth, professor of history and sociology at The Ohio State University, examines this trend in the context of homicide patterns throughout the history of the United States. The factors that correlate most consistently with national and regional homicide rates, he finds, are aspects of nation building, arguing that shifts in citizens’ beliefs about the legitimacy of their government, character of leadership, feelings of affinity for or alienation from fellow citizens, and acceptance or resentment of the social hierarchy affect the frequency with which Americans kill each other. This report is the first offering in HFG’s Violence, Politics & Democracy initiative, a multi-year project examining how these phenomena interact in mature democracies to better understand and counter political violence and other forces that damage democratic norms and institutions, imperiling the safety of citizens.Read or download the report (PDF)
