"I think it's good and right to be pursuing two strategies at the same time." PERIL's Bill Braniff on CBS News, on balancing rehabilitation and public safety supervision in the wake of the Berlin attack. Watch the whole interview here: bit.ly/4xi9HNh

Inside Germany's deradicalization programs as Berlin Pride attack suspect identified

Bill Braniff, executive director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, joins "The Daily Report" to break down the attack that took place at an LGBTQ+…

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Nearly two years after it became a national flashpoint, xenophobic rhetoric targeting Haitian immigrants in Ohio is still circulating online. PERIL's newest one-pager tracks how these narratives persist, and how to interrupt them. 🔗 bit.ly/4brohtr

Apply today! PERIL Research is looking for young adults to serve on our Youth Advisory Council. The YAC is a low-lift, high-impact volunteer opportunity for young people to help shape research. Ready to apply? For more information, visit

Youth Advisory Council - PERIL Research

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The US is facing its largest measles outbreak in over 30 years, and 94% of cases are among the unvaccinated or those with unknown status. PERIL's latest analysis tracks the misinformation spreading alongside it, and how to interrupt it. 🔗 bit.ly/4x1H2Mk

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Every team has five players on the court. The sixth is you. PERIL's new playbook, Be the Sixth Player is a five-part guide for fans and families on stepping in when hate and harassment show up: in the stands, in the comments, and in everyday conversations. 🔗 bit.ly/4vRAjDO

PERIL & Sports - PERIL Research

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Free training for K-12 educators: Student Wellness, Equity and Resilience in an Online World. PERIL's Christine German joins the AFT's Share My Lesson webinar July 29 at 12pm EDT. Register to watch live or on demand. 🔗 bit.ly/4yPumtR

Student Wellness, Equity and Resilience in an Online World: Strategies for K–12

Students today encounter biased, emotionally charged, and harmful messages at increasingly young ages—often before they have the social-emotional development or critical awareness to evaluate what…

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Terrorism prevention is a team effort. PERIL's Bill Braniff, Hala Furst, and Susan Szmania are among the inaugural members of Homeland Security Today's new Terrorism Prevention Editorial Board, launched to scale what works across the field. 🔗https://bit.ly/4vG9hzd

Homeland Security Today Announces Terrorism Prevention Editorial Board - HSToday

Washington, D.C. — Homeland Security Today, the premier nonprofit news and information platform serving the homeland security enterprise, today announced the official launch of its Terrorism…

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Even a Supreme Court ruling on tariffs became a vector for antisemitic conspiracy theories and us vs. them rhetoric. Read more in this next installment of PERIL's Crisis Mitigation series 🔗https://bit.ly/4fgVtEZ

"The public-health-informed approach...allows us to think about shared risk and protective factors for violence, and start to think about interventions that weren’t indexed on ideology.” PERIL's Bill Braniff in the New York Times on prevention-based approaches to targeted-violence. 🔗 bit.ly/4fpoQoW

Trump Administration Guts Efforts to Prevent Gun Violence, Suppressing Reports

As the administration works to expand gun rights, hospitals and community groups have lost funding, and reports on preventing firearm injuries have vanished from government websites.

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Weather conspiracies aren't just noise. They target disaster victims navigating recovery with disinformation and can fuel hostility toward the officials and communities helping them. PERIL's newest report breaks down the pattern of manipulation. 🔗 bit.ly/4vxkYbp

After the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, harmful narratives targeting LGBTQ+ and Latino communities spread quickly. The latest in PERIL's crisis response series documents harmful narratives in the wake of the shootings and how to address them. 🔗 bit.ly/4wu9q9H

Across 104 documented 764 cases, the same coercion playbook appears again and again. The warning signs are learnable. Perpetrators typically pose as peers, often as another teenager. 🧵 1/4 Read more here: bit.ly/4uZHJUT

Threats against members of Congress jumped from 9,474 to 14,938 in a single year. PERIL's Chief Strategy Officer Ryan Greer on the normalization of political violence and how deescalation can work. 🔗https://bit.ly/449n5XD

What Is the State of Political Violence in PA?

It’s not your imagination: American politics, including in Pennsylvania, has become more aggressive and, sadly, violent. From 2024 to 2025, the number of violent threats against members of Congr

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Where do 764 cases stand legally? Of the 104 documented incidents: 58 have charges pending, 25 ended in guilty pleas, and 5 in convictions at trial. Read that pending number alongside the incident curve. 🧵 1/2 Read more here: bit.ly/4uZHJUT

In our network map, the 764 node has 258 documented connections, more than twice any other node. But fixating on 764 itself misses the structure around it. The map documents 52 groups, including... 🧵 1/4 Read more here: bit.ly/4uZHJUT

Our network map tracks 23 platforms documented across 764-linked cases. Two dominate: Discord appears in 61 documented connections and Telegram in 40. But the more important pattern is the pipeline. 🧵 1/5 Read more here: bit.ly/4uZHJUT

In the days after the Iran war began, anti-Arab/anti-Muslim content rose 210% on Reddit and 180% on Gab. PERIL's latest crisis analysis brief tracks how bad actors exploit conflict to spread hate, and how to counter it. 🔗 bit.ly/4oSHw4L

Four overarching findings from tracking 104 incidents and mapping 406 nodes of the 764 ecosystem: 1. The threat is growing fast. From 6 documented incidents in 2021 to 51 in 2025. 2. It is an ecosystem, not a group. 52 interlinked groups, with a third of members in more than one.

A Dutch court recently sentenced a 22-year-old man from Spijkenisse to seven years in prison plus compulsory psychiatric treatment for the online sexual extortion of at least sixty girls aged 13 to 20. 🧵 1/4 Read more here: bit.ly/peril-764-re...

764 incidents in our dataset span 19 countries. The United States leads with 53, ... Brazil (7), Uruguay and Sweden (6 each), Canada (5), Romania and the United Kingdom (4 each), and the Netherlands (3), with cases as far afield as Australia, Argentina, and New Zealand. 🧵 1/3 bit.ly/peril-764-re...

The 764 network is global, but its center of gravity is the United States. Of the 104 documented 764-linked incidents in our dataset, 54 — more than half — occurred in the United States. Those 54 cases are spread across 25 states, half the country. 🧵 1/3 Read more here: bit.ly/peril-764-re...

What do 764-linked crimes actually consist of? Of the 104 incidents in our dataset: 75 involved child exploitation or sexual abuse material. Coerced self-harm is documented in 60 incidents, sextortion in 58, and coerced animal cruelty in 22. 🧵 1/3 Read more here: bit.ly/peril-764-re...

Crisis mitigation series: From data on more than 5,300 US mass shootings, fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent were committed by a trans or nonbinary person. PERIL's new brief demonstrates how scapegoating narratives spread after the Tumbler Ridge attack and explains how to counter them. bit.ly/4v2v7N6

Who joins a network like 764? Data on 764 challenges the assumption that online child exploitation is driven by older adults. This chart plots age of involvement rather than age at arrest, because those milestones are often years apart. 🧵 1/6 Read more here: bit.ly/peril-764-re...

What does 764 actually look like? We mapped it: 406 nodes connected by 1,206 documented relationships, built entirely from court filings, government press releases, analyst reports, and credible journalism. 🧵 1/4 Read more here: bit.ly/peril-764-re...

We have now documented 104 incidents linked to the 764 network across 19 countries. The trajectory is alarming. Our dataset records six incidents in 2021, the year the network was founded. By 2024 that number had jumped to 21.🧵 1/4 Read more here: bit.ly/peril-764-re...

6 incidents in 2021, 51 in 2025. PERIL's new report documents 104 incidents linked to the 764 network across 19 countries and maps the ecosystem driving one of the fastest-growing threats to children online. 🔗 bit.ly/peril-764-re...

When hate comes to campus, what should administrators, faculty, and students actually do? SPLC's new report cites recommendations built on PERIL's BRICK toolkit for resilient, inclusive campuses. 🔗 bit.ly/4vng3KA

2025 Year in Hate & Extremism: When the hard right comes to campus

The nation’s college campuses are some of the hard right’s most frequent targets. Speaking engagements remain a strategy of the movement.

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After the attempted bombing outside Mayor Mamdani's home, anti-Muslim rhetoric surged across fringe platforms. The new edition in PERIL's series on crisis events breaks down the manipulation tactics that spread after the attack and how they can be interrupted. 🔗 bit.ly/4owPL6n

Young people are increasingly accepting of same-sex relationships, but gender expression policing is as rigid as ever. Psychology Today's new piece cites Cynthia Miller-Idriss's Man Up to explain why that gap matters. 🔗 bit.ly/4uAcSOO

Reclaiming Authentic Connection—Say Patriarchy

When we stop policing gender norms, we allow ourselves to find connection with one another, regardless of our gender identification or expression.

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