  Hate and extremism cannot be controlled globally without understanding how
they operate at scale. Both have escalated dramatically during the Israel-Hamas
and Ukraine-Russia wars. Here we show how the online hate-extremism system is
now operating at unprecedented scale across 26 social media platforms of all
sizes, audience demographics, and geographic locations; and we analyze
individuals' journeys through it. This new picture contradicts notions of
rabbit-hole activity at the fringe of the Internet. Instead, it shows that
hate-extremism support now enjoys a direct link to more than a billion of the
general global population, and that newcomers now enjoy a rich variety of
online journey experiences during which they get to mingle with experienced
violent actors, discuss topics from diverse news sources, and learn to
collectively adapt in order to bypass platform shutdowns. Our results mean that
law enforcement must expect future mass shooters to have increasingly
hard-to-understand online journeys; that new E.U. laws will fall short because
the combined impact of many smaller, lesser-known platforms outstrips larger
ones like Twitter; and that the current global hate-extremism infrastructure
will become increasingly robust in 2024 and beyond. Fortunately, it also
reveals a new opportunity for system-wide control akin to adaptive vs.
extinction treatments for cancer.
