ISIS

The rise of ISIS and associated jihadi violence taking place in Syria and Iraq has reverberated widely. The effects can be felt not just in the horrific attacks that took place in Paris in January 2015, but across the Asia-Pacific region as well, including Australia. Public officials and analysts are struggling to understand and devise ...

The main purpose of this policy brief is to highlight the risks of radicalization by utilizing statistical analysis. The main question interrogated here is to determine the relation between the level of social reaction and ISIS’s attacks. These reactions are measured through Google Trends of news, web searches, and video ratings. Methodologically, Turkey, France, Belgium, ...

We present a machine learning framework that leverages a mixture of metadata, network, and temporal features to detect extremist users, and predict content adopters and interaction reciprocity in social media. We exploit a unique dataset containing millions of tweets generated by more than 25 thousand users who have been manually identified, reported, and suspended by ...

As a growing number of women engage in violent extremism, urgent questions about their recruitment and motivations are yet to be answered, particularly on the role of social media. Extremist organizations such as the Islamic State are adept at using social media messages to attract Western followers. Less clear is what tools can be used ...

Combating ISIS Online Panelists talked about *ISIS’ use of the Internet and social media to recruit supporters. They also addressed the U.S. government’s efforts to combat the terror group online. Other topics included whether internet and social media companies should be forced to identify and/or ban those suspected of promoting terror. The Islamic State of Iraq and ...

Financiers and fundraisers for al-Qaida and Islamic State (ISIS) are active users of popular social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram, in some cases even after being placed on a United Nations or US government sanctions list. Terrorist financiers and fundraisers have utilized social media to attract and direct funding to procure ...

Drawing on English and Arabic Islamic State (IS) communiqués produced by its central media units, wilayat information offices and broader supporter base, this study examines the strategic logic of IS information operations (IO). It argues that the overarching purpose of IS’s IO campaign is to shape the perceptions and polarise the support of audiences via ...

At a time when ISIS exploits social media to spread its ideology and gain new recruits, Monika Bickert, the head of global policy management at Facebook, explains how her team removes content that promotes violence and terrorism. Bickert, a former federal prosecutor, describes Facebook’s efforts to use “counter-speech” to fight hateful and extremist ideologies. ...

The emergence and actions of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/ISIS) has received widespread news coverage across the World, largely due to their capture of large swathes of land across Syria and Iraq, and the publishing of execution and propaganda videos. Enticed by such material published on social media and attracted ...

This Research Paper aims to analyse in depth the global propaganda strategy of the so-called “Islamic State” (IS) by looking at the methods through which this grand strategy is carried out as well as the objectives that IS wants to achieve through it. The authors first discuss IS’ growth model, explaining why global expansion and ...