Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter focuses on the impact of the Worldwide Web on the trajectories of new and controversial religious movements. The research data indicates that the use (misuse?) of the Internet has, paradoxically, facilitated the expansion of minority religions – and yet it has also undermined their quest for social legitimacy. The ways in which different interest groups in the “Cult Wars” (“anticult” organization, Christian “countercult” groups, ex-members support networks, second-generation members, teen chat rooms, and official Websites of NRMs) use the Internet are demonstrated – from evangelism, to “white-washing,” to whistle-blowing, to stigmatizing attacks. The unprecedented challenges to boundary maintenance in communal, utopian, or racialist religions posed by Internet communications are discussed, and the formation of virtual (“dis-embodied”) congregations described. The use of the Internet in the “cult wars,” by human rights and religious freedom activists, for the formation of new interest groups, and for the forging and wielding of new cyber-weapons in these sectarian struggles (e.g. hacking or blocking Websites, promoting conspiracy theories) is discussed, drawing on examples from the Falun Gong, Scientology, the International Raelian Movement, ISKCON, and others.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".