Paris And Nice Terrorist Attacks: Exploring Twitter And Web Archives
September 18, 2023
The attacks suffered by France in January and November 2015, and then in the course of 2016, especially the Nice attack, provoked intense online activity both during the events and in the months that followed. The digital traces left by this reactivity and reactions to events gave rise, from the very first days and even ...
Detection Of Jihadism In Social Networks Using Big Data
September 18, 2023
Social networks are being used by terrorist organizations to distribute messages with the intention of influencing people and recruiting new members. The research presented in this paper focuses on the analysis of Twitter messages to detect the leaders orchestrating terrorist networks and their followers. A big data architecture is proposed to analyze messages in real ...
ISIS at Its Apogee: The Arabic Discourse on Twitter and What We Can Learn From That About ISIS Support and Foreign Fighters
September 18, 2023
We analyze 26.2 million comments published in Arabic language on Twitter, from July 2014 to January 2015, when Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)’s strength reached its peak and the group was prominently expanding the territorial area under its control. By doing that, we are able to measure the share of support and aversion ...
Hashtag Palestine 2018: An Overview of Digital Rights Abuses of Palestinians
September 18, 2023
The report notes that in 2018, the Israeli government continued to systematically target Palestinians and the right to freedom of expression via the Internet. In the year 2018, Israeli authorities arrested around 350 Palestinians in the West Bank on charges of “incitement” because of their publications on social media. 7amleh – The Arab Center for ...
Online Radicalization and Social Media: A Case Study of Daesh
September 18, 2023
The importance of the Internet and social media in politics has been demonstrated in previous years, when terms such as ‘Twitter revolution’ and ‘Facebook revolution’ were used repeatedly for several movements, and now new terms such as ‘digital threat’ and ‘digital Jihad’ are being used by many in similar fashion. In the age of the ...
Researching far right groups on Twitter: Methodological challenges 2.0
September 18, 2023
The Internet poses a number of challenges for academics. Internet specificities such as anonymity, the decontextualisation of discourse, the misuse or non-use of references raise methodological questions about the quality and the authenticity of the data available online. This is particularly true when dealing with extremist groups and grass-root militants that cultivate secrecy. Based on ...
Disrupting Daesh: Measuring Takedown of Online Terrorist Material and Its Impacts
September 18, 2023
This article contributes to public and policy debates on the value of social media disruption activity with respect to terrorist material. In particular, it explores aggressive account and content takedown, with the aim of accurately measuring this activity and its impacts. The major emphasis of the analysis is the so-called Islamic State (IS) and disruption ...
A Large-Scale Study Of ISIS Social Media Strategy: Community Size, Collective Influence, And Behavioral Impact
September 18, 2023
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has received a tremendous amount of media coverage in the past few years for their successful use of social media to spread their message and to recruit new members. In this work, we leverage access to the full Twitter Firehose to perform a large-scale observational study of ...
Applying Local Image Feature Descriptions to Aid the Detection of Radicalization Processes in Twitter
September 18, 2023
This paper was presented at the 2nd European Counter-Terrorism Centre (ECTC) Advisory Group conference, 17-18 April 2018, at Europol Headquarters, The Hague. ...
Blood and Security during the Norway Attacks: Authorities’ Twitter Activity and Silence
September 18, 2023
This chapter analyses the Norwegian authorities’ presence on Twitter during the 22 July 2011 terrorist attacks. Twitter activity by two official institutions is analysed in particular, namely, the blood bank at Oslo University Hospital and the Norwegian Police Security Services (PST). Our findings show that the Norwegian authorities were almost completely absent on Twitter during ...