Transnational and trans-topic web-of-influence ahead of U.K. city riots

The sudden emergence of large-scale riots in otherwise unconnected cities across the U.K. in summer 2024 shocked both governments and citizens. Irrespective of these riots’ specific trigger, a key question is how to assess the appetite for such widespread rioting ahead of time. Here, we analyze a multiplatform web of online hate and extremist communities preceding the riots. It reveals a web-of-influence that existed well before the rioting, involving communities locally, nationally, and globally. This web-of-influence has a persistent resilience—and hence still represents a significant threat in the future—because of its feedback across regional-national-international scales and across topics; its use of lesser-known platforms puts it beyond any single government or platform’s reach. While we do not claim causality, our findings provide context for the social dynamics ahead of the riots and illuminate the online infrastructure that helped enable large-scale mobilization. Going forward, our findings mean that if city administrators coordinate across local-national-international divides, they can map this threat as we have done and implement scalable intervention techniques to avoid real-world destructive rioting.