At their most extreme, these pathways can lead people to violence. A report from 2018 set out to investigate whether Facebook was facilitating ISIS propaganda, and showed how important social networks have been in recruiting new members to the terrorist group. It is a study in homophily: people are gradually pulled from the mainstream of political life into more and more extreme communities. Befriending one ISIS supporter leads Facebook to recommend a dozen other pro-ISIS accounts. ‘Facebook, in their desire to connect as many people as possible, have inadvertently created a system which helps
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