That's explained in the paper:
> Our list of extremist channels consists of those labeled as white identitarian by Ledwich and Zaitsev (26) (30 channels), white supremacist by Charles (45) (23 channels), alt-right by Ribeiro et al. (24) (37 channels), extremist or hateful by the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League (16 channels), and those compiled by journalist Aaron Sankin from lists curated by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, the Counter Extremism Project, and the white supremacist website Stormfront (157 channels) (46).
If you're claiming to fight extremism you should also fight extremists that support your political views.
Yeah, its always easiest to just make up an example that never happened. SPLC didn't defend Antifa as just wrongheaded.
It just doesn’t designate them a hate group because they, whatever else they might be, aren’t about the kind of discrimination that SPLC uses to define a hate group (nor, despite sometimes being at odds with government, are they centered on the kind of anti-government ideology that SPLC defines its catalog of anti-government extremist groups with.)
Ironically, what SPLC is beinf criticized for with Antifa is actually having specific meanings for its designations rather than arbitrarily applying them to everyone it disagrees with.
> If you're claiming to fight extremism you should also fight extremists that support your political views.
The SPLC does not now, and never has, claimed to be a force of generic moderation fighting generic “extremism”; its mission has always been to fight for racial justice and specifically against white supremacy. (It has since 1990 tracked hate groups and antigovernment extremist groups, two sets which overlap and which it has observed are influential in the issues it fights against, but the definitions used and purposes of that have always been, quite openly, shaped by and in service to it's primary mission, not orthogonal to it.)
And, having said that, they do include in their catalogs grouos meeting their definition that purport to be aligned against the same things as SPLC, like the New Black Panther Party (which is both listed by them as an “anti-government extremist” group and a “designated hate group” by SPLC.)
I can go on, the google results are quite numerous on this issue....
Hate grouos have been saying it the whole time the SPLC has been around, and the US has lots of hate groups.
Its become more current in the broader American Right as quiet-part-out-loud groups have moved from the margins since Trump became a leading figure.
2. Declare certain things "extremism" based on subjective criteria that totally have nothing to do with whether or not they agree with you
3. ??????
4. Your opinion is declared scientific truth
Sure.
Having said that Antifa comes to mind as do a number of similar groups, past and present. As to whether you call these "communist" or not does not really matter as political terminology is intentionally vague - anything to the right of a "progressive" soon becomes "extreme-right/fascist/nazi/...", anything to the left of a "hard-line conservative" soon becomes "communist/socialist/anarchist/...".
So yes, there is plenty of violence on the left side of the political spectrum, probably more than there is on the right side of the spectrum. Take e.g. the 2020 BLM riots as an example for what this looks like. The media tends to tone down their reporting when it comes to the former which lead to terms like "fiery bur mostly peaceful protests" [2,3] while exaggerating the latter but the facts speak for themselves.
Violence is violence no matter whether it comes from the right, the centre of the left. A rock thrown by a Muslim does as much damage as one thrown by an atheist or a flag-waving "patriot".
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/about-those-domestic-terrorists...
[2] https://thecritic.co.uk/the-myth-behind-blms-peaceful-protes...
[3] https://thehill.com/homenews/media/513902-cnn-ridiculed-for-...
It is good to be skeptical of an individual piece of research. The objections to a piece of research ought to about how the authors went about their research. Critique their specific methodology or their use of statistics. Critique their conclusion by showing it doesn't follow from their reported findings.
What one should not do, which is what the person I responded to seems to have done, is say that research in this area is likely to be contaminated by too much bias and thus disregard it. That is an intellectually lazy response and fraught with too much bias on the part of the person in engaging in such reasoning.
This watering down of the concept of extremism is the dangerous part. YouTube doesn't host ISIS or KKK content. Videos from the opposite of your position on the political spectrum is not extremism.
The data comes from a survey and automated observation of just ~1,100 people. Super controlled, high quality, reliable source. /s
This is simple the Church of Science pulling its weight for the government that funds them.