Online Library

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 countermeasures to the recruitment mechanisms employed by ISIS and other violent extremist groups. This essay explores the role that social media has played in ISIS’s efforts to attract adherents.

Documentary: Isis and The Internet premieres Friday April 1st at 10pm ET on MSNBC.

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 toward the Islamic State within the online Arab communities. We then investigate two specific topics. First, by exploiting the time granularity of the tweets, we link the opinions with daily events to understand the main determinants of the changing trend in support toward ISIS. Second, by taking advantage of the geographical locations of tweets, we explore the relationship between online opinions across countries and the number of foreign fighters joining ISIS.

ƒWhile not as large as in many other Western
countries, ISIS-related mobilization in the United States
has been unprecedented.

As of the fall of 2015, U.S.
authorities speak of some 250 Americans who have
traveled or attempted to travel to Syria/Iraq to join the
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and 900 active investigations
against ISIS sympathizers in all 50 states.

ƒ Seventy-one individuals have been charged with
ISIS-related activities since March 2014. Fifty-six have
been arrested in 2015 alone, a record number of
terrorism-related arrests for any year since 9/11. Of
those charged:
‚ The average age is 26.
‚ 86% are male.
‚ Their activities were located in 21 states.
‚ 51% traveled or attempted to travel abroad.
‚ 27% were involved in plots to carry out attacks on
U.S. soil.
‚ 55% were arrested in an operation involving an
informant and/or an undercover agent.

ƒ A small number of Americans have been killed in
ISIS-related activities: three inside the U.S., at least a
dozen abroad.

ƒ The profiles of individuals involved in ISIS-related activities
in the U.S. differ widely in race, age, social class,
education, and family background. Their motivations
are equally diverse and defy easy analysis.
ƒ Social media plays a crucial role in the radicalization
and, at times, mobilization of U.S.-based ISIS sympathizers.
The Program on Extremism has identified some
300 American and/or U.S.-based ISIS sympathizers active
on social media, spreading propaganda, and interacting
with like-minded individuals. Some members
of this online echo chamber eventually make the leap
from keyboard warriors to actual militancy.

ƒ American ISIS sympathizers are particularly active on
Twitter, where they spasmodically create accounts that
often get suspended in a never-ending cat-and-mouse
game. Some accounts (the “nodes”) are the generators
of primary content, some (the “amplifiers”) just retweet
material, others (the “shout-outs”) promote newly created
accounts of suspended users.

ƒ ISIS-related radicalization is by no means limited to
social media. While instances of purely web-driven,
individual radicalization are numerous, in several cases
U.S.-based individuals initially cultivated and later
strengthened their interest in ISIS’s narrative through
face-to-face relationships. In most cases online and
offline dynamics complement one another.

ƒ The spectrum of U.S.-based sympathizers’ actual involvement
with ISIS varies significantly, ranging from
those who are merely inspired by its message to those
few who reached mid-level leadership positions within
the group.

The Syrian conflict led to a resurrection of ISIS in terms of recruitment, financing, propaganda, and enlisting itself as an actor in the Middle East. ISIS’s ability to use both social media and other traditional methods of recruitment requires countries like Turkey to adopt multi-faceted approaches in order to be more effective. Cyberspace, and particularly social media, is very critical to understanding how ISIS sustains its recruitment and propaganda activities.

This report entitled ‘ISIS in Cyberspace: Findings from Social Media Research’ focuses on social media and terrorism by analyzing how pro-ISIS Twitter users see and legitimize ISIS and its ideology in cyberspace. Following an extensive review of literature on ISIS’s historical background along with its capabilities in various fields, the research analyzes tweeting patterns of sampled pro-ISIS Twitter accounts and examines the contents of messages posted by those accounts.

This book offers a comprehensive overview and analysis of the Islamic State’s use of propaganda. Combining a range of different theoretical perspectives from across the social sciences, and using rigorous methods, the authors trace the origins of the Islamic State’s message, laying bare the strategic logic guiding its evolution, examining each of its multi-media components, and showing how these elements work together to radicalize audiences’ worldviews. This volume highlights the challenges that this sort of “full-spectrum propaganda” raises for counter terrorism forces. It is not only a one-stop resource for any analyst of IS and Salafi-jihadism, but also a rich contribution to the study of text and visual propaganda, radicalization and political violence, and international security.