The Enemy of My Enemy Is Not My Friend: Arabic Twitter Sentiment toward ISIS and the United States
September 18, 2023
A counter-intuitive finding emerges from an analysis of Arabic Twitter posts from 2014 to 2015: Twitter participants who are negative toward the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) are also more likely to hold negative views of the United States. This surprising correlation is due to the interpretations of two sets of users. ...
New forms of cultural nationalism? American and British Indians in the Trump and Brexit Twittersphere
September 18, 2023
Diaspora networks are one of the key, but often invisible, drivers in reinforcing long-distance nationalism towards the ‘homeland’ but simultaneously construct nationalist myths within their countries of residence. This article examines Indian diaspora supporters of Brexit and Trump in the United Kingdom and the United States who promote exclusionary nationalist imaginaries. Combining quantitative and qualitative ...
Social media corporations as actors of counter-terrorism
September 18, 2023
This article discusses the role of giant social media corporations Facebook, Google (YouTube), and Twitter in counter-terrorism and countering violent extremisms (CT/CVEs). Based on a qualitative investigation mobilizing corporate communications as well as a collection of interviews with European stakeholders, it argues that these firms have become actors in this policy area of what is ...
From Tweeter to Terrorist: Combatting Online Propaganda When Jihad Goes Viral
September 18, 2023
From Tweeter to Terrorist: Combatting Online Propaganda When Jihad Goes Viral ...
Terrorist Communications: Are Facebook, Twitter, and Google Responsible for the Islamic State’s Actions?
September 18, 2023
Four of the world’s largest Internet companies pledged to monitor, combat, and prevent terrorists from using their social media platforms to conduct operations in May 2016. One month later, Twitter, Facebook, and Google were sued for deaths caused by the Islamic State in 2015, and their alleged allowance and facilitation of terrorist communication. A growing ...
Tweeting Terror Live: Al-Shabaab’s Use of Twitter during the Westgate Attack and Implications for Counterterrorism Communications
September 18, 2023
This article will analyze the motivations for and use of live-tweets during a terrorist attack. The employment of live-tweets offers terrorist groups the opportunity to adopt the role of a media outlet to exploit the advantages of live coverage typically exercised by mainstream media. This poses a unique challenge to policy makers and international media ...
A Snapshot of the Syrian Jihadi Online Ecology: Differential Disruption, Community Strength, and Preferred Other Platforms
September 18, 2023
This article contributes to the growing literature on extremist and terrorist online ecologies and approaches to snapshotting these. It opens by measuring Twitter’s differential disruption of so-called “Islamic State” versus other jihadi parties to the Syria conflict, showing that while Twitter became increasingly inhospitable to IS in 2017 and 2018, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and Ahrar ...
Cross-national level report on digital sociability and drivers of self-radicalisation in Europe
September 18, 2023
In this report, we present an empirical cross-national study of supporters of right-wing extremists’ (RWE) and Islamist extremists’ (ISE) activities and interactions on Twitter. The study is based on ethnographic and automatic text and network analyses of data from Belgian, British, Dutch, French, German, Greek and Norwegian female and male Twitter accounts. ...
Mining ideological discourse on Twitter: The case of extremism in Arabic
September 18, 2023
Extremism has been a problematic term to define and suggests different and opposing meanings. This study explores how Twitter users conceptualize extremism in Arabic and express their opinions/arguments to construct the term. A corpus of tweets was collected from Twitter API using the word ‘تطرف أو متطرف’ in Arabic for extremist/extremism. A topic modeling algorithm ...
A “Europe des Nations”: far right imaginative geographies and the politicization of cultural crisis on Twitter in Western Europe
September 18, 2023
Contestation over European integration has been widely studied in the rhetoric of parties, leaders, and movements on the far right in a variety of media. Focusing on Twitter use by far right actors in Western Europe, we apply corpus-aided discourse analysis to explore how imaginative geographies are used to politicize Europe among their digital publics. ...