Category hubs

Editorial hubs covering 15 categories of high-control group. Each hub explains what falls within the category, why this category can carry high-control risk, the common BITE patterns and warning signs, and links to the relevant tactic hubs, recovery resources, and named-group profiles.

These editorial hubs are distinct from the auto-filtered group lists at /groups/category/[slug]; the former is structured by editorial topic and the latter by the dataset's canonical short labels. Both surfaces are cross-linked.

• Christian high-control groups

  Editorial hub for Christian-tradition high-control groups — distinct sub-currents within Catholicism, Protestantism, Pentecostalism, Mormon-fundamentalism, and adjacent traditions. Mainstream Christianity is not in scope.

• New religious movements (NRMs)

  Editorial hub for new religious movements — religious traditions founded primarily in the 19th–21st centuries that include both well-known high-control groups (Scientology, Aum Shinrikyo, NXIVM-style movements) and many lower-control entries.

• Wellness and influencer-led groups

  Editorial hub for wellness, alternative-health, and influencer-led communities that exhibit high-control patterns — including some yoga-meditation organisations, healing communities, and online wellness ecosystems.

• MLM and financial-extraction groups

  Editorial hub for multi-level marketing organisations and other commercial structures that exhibit cult-adjacent BITE patterns — recruitment-based revenue, status hierarchies, social-network capture, escalating financial commitment.

• Online guru communities

  Editorial hub for influencer-led online communities — Discord servers, Telegram channels, YouTube and Substack ecosystems — that exhibit high-control patterns at smaller scale than traditional religious organisations.

• Political and ideological movements

  Editorial hub for political and ideological movements where high-control patterns are documented — including some far-right, far-left, accelerationist, and political-religious sub-currents. Mainstream political participation is not in scope.

• Extremist recruitment and coercive control

  Editorial hub for organisations whose recruitment and indoctrination patterns produce documented coercive control with extremist-violence outcomes — ISIS-style networks, Boko Haram, neo-Nazi accelerationist groups, and adjacent entities.

• Yoga, meditation, and spiritual communities

  Editorial hub for yoga, meditation, and adjacent spiritual communities where high-control patterns have been documented. Most yoga and meditation practice is not in scope; specific guru-led communities are.

• Therapy and personal-growth groups

  Editorial hub for personal-growth, group-therapy, and self-help programmes where high-control patterns are documented. Most therapy and most personal-growth work is not in scope.

• High-control schools and boarding communities

  Editorial hub for educational institutions and boarding communities where high-control BITE patterns are documented — including some religious boarding schools, troubled-teen programmes, and residential 'character formation' communities.

• Communal-living groups

  Editorial hub for residential communal-living organisations where documented high-control patterns are present — including some religious communes, intentional communities, and communal experiments.

• Fundamentalist groups

  Editorial hub for fundamentalist sub-currents within major religious traditions — Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and other — that exhibit documented BITE patterns. Mainstream traditions are not graded as wholes.

• Conspiracy communities

  Editorial hub for online-organised conspiracy communities (QAnon-adjacent, anti-vaccine, sovereign-citizen, others) where documented BITE-pattern emergence is observable.

• Coaching programme red flags

  Editorial hub for coaching programmes where documented BITE-pattern features are present. Most coaching is not in scope; specific high-pressure, high-cost, social-network-capturing programmes are.

• Crypto and investment communities

  Editorial hub for cryptocurrency and investment communities where documented BITE-pattern features are present. Most crypto and most investment communities are not in scope.