Online Library

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

The arrest of two female would-be suicide bombers in Jakarta in December 2016 shows the desire of Indonesian women for a more active role in violent extremism. It may be a reflection of the pro-ISIS movement’s weakness that male leaders are more willing to oblige them than in the past, but the initiative has come from the women. Indonesian women’s increasing willingness to organise social media groups, set up fund-raising charities and provide various forms of logistical support for the pro-ISIS movement shows that this is not just men exploiting vulnerable women – though that also takes place – but involves women eager to be recognised as fighters in their own right.

The Internet and online platforms have become a useful instrument for modern terrorists’ recruitment. Numerous studies explored the online recruitment of Jihadi groups and especially of the Islamic State (ISIS) that managed to recruit over 40,000 fighters from as many as 90 countries. Yet, these studies, focusing mainly on the online platforms and the appeals used, lacked a theoretical framework that can serve the search for the factors explaining process and its success. In this chapter we suggest that the notion of motivational imbalance as a key persuasive appeal in terrorist online recruitment can provide the needed psychological theoretical concept to explain their recruitment strategy. To do so, we examine terrorist online recruitment and its features (stages, type of messages, content of the messages, characteristics of the targets) and relate it to the notion of motivational imbalance. Then we explore the trend of ‘narrowcasting’ (focusing persuasive communication on selected target audiences) and how well it combines with motivational imbalance in the process of recruitment by terrorist groups. Finally, we demonstrate how motivational imbalance has been used in recent Jihadi recruitment campaigns. The evidence presented comes from the contents of recruitment campaigns as well as from the testimonies of recruits.

This article reports on the International Center for Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE’s) most recent Facebook ad
campaign aimed at raising awareness about the realities of living under ISIS and protecting vulnerable potential
recruits from considering joining. During the course of 24 days in December of 2017, ICSVE researchers mounted
the campaign on Facebook using a counter-narrative video produced by ICSVE. The Facebook ad campaign
targeted Iraq, where Facebook is the most widely used social media platform, with ISIS also driving powerful
recruiting campaigns on Facebook and enticing youth into joining. The results were promising in terms of driving
engagement with our counternarrative video materials, leading close to 1.7 million views and hundreds of specific
comments related to both our video content and ISIS in general. In terms of policy implications, in addition to
raising awareness about the dangers of joining ISIS and our Breaking the ISIS Brand Counter Narrative Project, the
campaign served as an important platform to challenge extremist narratives as well as channel doubt, frustration,
and anger into positive exchange of ideas and participation.

Drawing on Tilly’s notion of “repertoire of action,” this article shows how the evolution of the global jihadist movement’s communicative action repertoire has increased the potential resonance of its discourse. It foresees the construction of the global jihadist movement’s discourse of mobilization as the result of the evolution of its network of actors, the context in which its communications are undertaken, and its adaptation to new communication technologies. Accordingly, it argues that the decentralization of the global jihadist movement has led to a widening of its communicative action repertoire and a diversification of its discourse offering.

Social media platforms play a key role in fostering the outreach of extremism by influencing the views, opinions, and perceptions of people. These platforms are increasingly exploited by extremist elements for spreading propaganda, radicalizing, and recruiting youth. Hence, research on extremism detection on social media platforms is essential to curb its influence and ill effects. A study of existing literature on extremism detection reveals that it is restricted to a specific ideology, binary classification with limited insights on extremism text, and manual data validation methods to check data quality. In existing research studies, researchers have used datasets limited to a single ideology. As a result, they face serious issues such as class imbalance, limited insights with class labels, and a lack of automated data validation methods. A major contribution of this work is a balanced extremism text dataset, versatile with multiple ideologies verified by robust data validation methods for classifying extremism text into popular extremism types such as propaganda, radicalization, and recruitment. The presented extremism text dataset is a generalization of multiple ideologies such as the standard ISIS dataset, GAB White Supremacist dataset, and recent Twitter tweets on ISIS and white supremacist ideology. The dataset is analyzed to extract features for the three focused classes in extremism with TF‐IDF unigram, bigrams, and trigrams features. Additionally, pretrained word2vec features are used for semantic analysis. The extracted features in the proposed dataset are evaluated using machine learning classification algorithms such as multinomial Naïve Bayes, support vector machine, random forest, and XGBoost algorithms. The best results were achieved by support vector machine using the TF‐IDF unigram model confirming 0.67 F1 score. The proposed multi‐ideology and multiclass dataset shows comparable performance to the existing datasets limited to single ideology and binary labels.