The Mediums and the Messages: Exploring the Language of Islamic State Media through Sentiment Analysis
September 18, 2023
This study applies the method of sentiment analysis to the online media released by the Islamic State (IS) in order to distinguish the ways in which IS uses language within their media, and potential ways in which this language differs across various online platforms. The data used for this sentiment analysis consist of transcripts of ...
‘Beyond Anything We Have Ever Seen’: Beheading Videos and the Visibility of Violence in the War against ISIS.
September 18, 2023
This article examines the role of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’s (ISIS’s) beheading videos in the United Kingdom and the United States. These videos are highly illustrative demonstrations of the importance of visual imagery and visual media in contemporary warfare. By functioning as evidence in a political discourse constituting ISIS as an imminent, ...
Although the (Dis-)Believers Dislike it: a Backgrounder on IS Hostage Videos – August – December 2014
September 18, 2023
With the beheading video of U.S. photojournalist James Foley, the Islamic State (IS) initiated a hostage video campaign that received tremendous coverage in the international news media. This backgrounder highlights the most important aspects of IS hostage videos with a particular focus on their media strategic functions, which, in part, stand in sharp contrast with ...
Mobilization and Radicalization Through Persuasion: Manipulative Techniques in ISIS’ Propaganda
September 18, 2023
This paper explores the recent findings of some empirical research concerning Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham’s (ISIS’) communication and tries to synthesize them under the theoretical frame of propaganda’s concept and practices. Many authors demonstrated how ISIS propaganda campaigns, in particular those deployed on cyberspace, proved to be effective in recruiting new members in ...
From Isolation to Radicalization: Anti-Muslim Hostility and Support for ISIS in the West
September 18, 2023
What explains online radicalization and support for ISIS in the West? Over the past few years, thousands of individuals have radicalized by consuming extremist content online, many of whom eventually traveled overseas to join the Islamic State. This study examines whether anti-Muslim hostility might drive pro-ISIS radicalization in Europe. Using new geo-referenced data on the ...
Multimodal Classification of Violent Online Political Extremism Content with Graph Convolutional Networks
September 18, 2023
In this paper we present a multimodal approach to categorizing user posts based on their discussion topic. To integrate heterogeneous information extracted from the posts, i.e. text, visual content and the information about user interactions with the online platform, we deploy graph convolutional networks that were recently proven effective in classification tasks on knowledge graphs. ...
Arguing with ISIS: Web 2.0, Open Source Journalism, and Narrative Disruption
September 18, 2023
This paper considers American strategies for countering ISIS social media, focusing on notions of narrative and rational debate in the Web 2.0 era. In addition to chronicling an evolution in American governmental ideas about the online public sphere, the paper looks specifically at the work of Al-Tamimi, an open source journalist who verifies and catalogues ...
‘Like Sheep Among Wolves’: Characterizing Hateful Users on Twitter
September 18, 2023
Hateful speech in Online Social Networks (OSNs) is a key challenge for companies and governments, as it impacts users and advertisers, and as several countries have strict legislation against the practice. This has motivated work on detecting and characterizing the phenomenon in tweets, social media posts and comments. However, these approaches face several shortcomings due ...
The Viral Mediation of Terror: ISIS, Image, Implosion
September 18, 2023
Operations involving the capture, processing, and transmission of terrorist events, campaigns, or images produce effects well beyond the representational/informational functions of media. This article examines several unspoken effects involved in the mediation of terrorism. We analyze the extent to which several mechanisms and operations of western media may be complicit in, if not fundamental to, ...
Apocalypse, Later: A Longitudinal Study of the Islamic State Brand
September 18, 2023
This article compares two universes of official Islamic State media that were compiled 18 months apart. It explores the nuances of the group’s worldview and illustrates the extent to which external and internal situational exigencies impacted the Islamic State’s brand during its formative years as caliphate. It finds that the organization’s media infrastructure was about ...