Measuring the Impact of ISIS Social Media Strategy
September 18, 2023
Terrorist groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have exploited social media such as Twitter to spread their propaganda and to recruit new members. In this work we study the extent to which ISIS is able to spread their message beyond their immediate supporters. Are they operating in their own sphere with ...
Understanding the Impact of Terrorist Event Reporting on Countering Violent Extremism: From A Practitioner’s Perspective
September 18, 2023
This report presents the key findings from the London Roundtable on “Understanding the Impact of Terrorist Event Reporting on Countering Violent Extremism”. The event was held at the Australian High Commission in London on 30-31 January 2018. The roundtable brought together media practitioners, CVE and PVE front line practitioners, policy-makers and academics drawn from Australia, ...
Dar al-Islam: A Quantitative Analysis of ISIS’s French-Language Magazine
September 18, 2023
This study is a content analysis of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)’s French-language magazine Dar al-Islam. The first seven issues of the magazine are quantitatively examined and broken down into the number of articles, images, and terms used as a means of determining how ISIS targets French-speaking individuals. This study find that ISIS ...
The Eglyph Web Crawler: ISIS Content on YouTube
September 18, 2023
From March 8 to June 8, 2018, the Counter Extremism Project (CEP) conducted a study to better understand how ISIS content is being uploaded to YouTube, how long it is staying online, and how many views these videos receive. To accomplish this, CEP conducted a limited search for a small set of just 229 previously-identified ...
Finding Extremists in Online Social Networks
September 18, 2023
Online extremists’ use of social media poses a new form of threat to the general public. These extremists range from cyberbullies to terrorist organizations. Social media providers often suspend the extremists’ accounts in response to user complaints. However, extremist users can simply create new accounts and continue their activities. In this work we present a ...
Using Internet search data to examine the relationship between anti-Muslim and pro-ISIS sentiment in U.S. counties
September 18, 2023
Recent terrorist attacks by first- and second-generation immigrants in the United States and Europe indicate that radicalization may result from the failure of ethnic integration—or the rise of intergroup prejudice in communities where “home-grown” extremists are raised. Yet, these community-level drivers are notoriously difficult to study because public opinion surveys provide biased measures of both ...
Down, but Not Out: An Updated Examination of the Islamic State’s Visual Propaganda
September 18, 2023
As the physical territory held by the group known as the Islamic State diminished in 2016-2017, concern about of the status of the group’s “virtual” caliphate increased. This report focuses on one aspect of that virtual caliphate: the production of visual propaganda by the group’s ofcial media bureaus. Using a dataset of more than 13,000 ...
Pulling Back the Curtain: An Inside Look at the Islamic State’s Media Organization
September 18, 2023
The CTC is committed to continuing to search out unique sources of data to provide insight into the workings of terrorist organizations and, when possible, making them available to the broader research community, which will undoubtedly add its own insights and continue to enhance our collective understanding. To further this end, all of the documents ...
The Role of Police Online in PVE and CVE
September 18, 2023
This paper is written for police wanting an overview of their online PCVE options, and is based on the RAN POL meeting on ‘The role of police online’ that took place on 1-2 March in Oslo. ...
Jihadi Beheading Videos and their Non-Jihadi Echoes
September 18, 2023
In recent years, the Islamic State terror organization has become notorious for its evil brutality. The brutal nature of its propaganda (distributed mostly online) inspires Jihadi sympathizers around the world, encouraging them to use violence against “the enemies of Islam”. This form of violent behavior has also been adopted and imitated by others – including ...