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VOX-Pol Blog post.

In an era of social media, the lines between physical and virtual realities have become blurred. This is especially evident in recruitment activities by violent extremists. This article compares five case studies from the white power and militia movements to learn how extremists attract new members. The findings suggest that recruitment occurs through iterative interactions in virtual and physical spaces. These spaces are not isolated to a single movement; individuals instead move between them. The findings did not reveal a divergence between civilian vs military recruits. Nevertheless, more research is needed on the extent to which veterans recruit their peers.

Online social media platforms such as Twitter have been found to be misused by extremist groups, including Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), who attract and recruit social media users. To prevent their influence from expanding in the online social media platforms, it is required to understand the online behaviors of these extremist group users and their followers, for predicting and identifying potential security threats. We present an empirical study about ISIS followers’ online behaviors on Twitter, proposing to classify their tweets in terms of political and subjectivity polarities. We first develop a supervised classification model for the polarity classification, based on natural language processing and clustering methods. We then develop a statistical analysis of term-polarity correlations, which leads us to successfully observe ISIS followers’ online behaviors, which are in line with the reports of experts.

Al-Qaeda’s media strategy in 2009 reflected the group’s attempts to meet the triple challenge of a shifting media landscape, its enmeshment in the Afghanistan-Pakistan nexus, and the global jihadist movement’s failures over the last several years. The results are ambiguous. Al-Qaeda appears to be holding the attention of the faithful, but it faces a rising din of competing voices, an Internet that is more and more of a mixed blessing, and less resonance in mainstream Arab media than in years past.

This brief study surveys a representative sample of Arabic- language jihadist* media from July 2007 and attempts to answer two simple, yet crucial, questions: What does the structure of jihadist media tell us about the relationship between Al-Qaeda central and the movements that affiliate themselves with it? And what can the priorities of jihadist media tell us about the operational priorities of Al-Qaeda and affiliated movements?

Sunni insurgents in Iraq and their supporters and sympathizer worldwide are pursuing a massive and far-reaching media campaign that includes daily press releases, weekly and monthly magazines, video clips, full-length films, and even television channels. Iraqi Insurgent Media: The War of Images and Ideas casts light on this crucial yet understudied factor in the battle to shape perceptions in Iraq and the Arab world. The report surveys the products, producers, and delivery channels of the Sunni insurgency’s media network; examines their message; and gauges their impact.