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This work examines the intersections of subcultural theories and radicalization theories from terrorism studies to identify how they may be improved through integration. To date there have been almost no efforts to merge these frameworks, though terrorism shares common characteristics of deviant subcultures. Both are driven by ideologies that are in opposition to that of their targets. We focus particularly on the process of online radicalization to assess how subcultural research in online environments may inform the process of enculturation into a terrorist belief system. We conclude by discussing the implications of this expansion for research on terrorism and subcultures.

Using a dataset of over 1.9 million messages posted on Twitter by about 25,000 ISIS members, we explore how ISIS makes use of social media to spread its propaganda and to recruit militants from the Arab world and across the globe. By distinguishing between violence-driven, theological, and sectarian content, we trace the connection between online rhetoric and key events on the ground. To the best of our knowledge, ours is one of the first studies to focus on Arabic content, while most literature focuses on English content. Our findings yield new important insights about how social media is used by radical militant groups to target the Arab-speaking world, and reveal important patterns in their propaganda efforts.

From its start, the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/ISIS) has been successfully exploiting social media networks, most notoriously Twitter, to promote its propaganda and recruit new members, resulting in thousands of social media users adopting pro-ISIS stance every year. Automatic identification of pro-ISIS users on social media has, thus, become the centre of interest for various governmental and research organisations. In this paper we propose a semantic-based approach for radicalisation detection on Twitter. Unlike most previous works, which mainly rely on the lexical and contextual representation of the content published by Twitter users, our approach extracts and makes use of the underlying semantics of words exhibited by these users to identify their pro/anti-ISIS stances. Our results show that classifiers trained from words’ semantics outperform those trained from lexical and network features by 2% on average F1-measure.

This paper provides an overview of the evolution of the concept of jihadism as it presently exists in cyberspace. From its roots during the Chechen conflict to the current use of social media by the Islamic State (IS), this paper identifies and examines three highly significant paradigm shifts: (1) the emergence of rudimentary Web 2.0 platforms and jihadist forums; (2) the advent of advanced Web 2.0 and social media platforms as methods of spreading jihadism; and (3) turn towards ‘lone wolf’ terrorism. In this paper, the author argues that IS’ extensive reliance on unaffiliated sympathizers, who either re-tweet or re-post content produced and authorized by the IS leadership can be seen as a groundbreaking paradigm shift in the evolution of jihadism in cyberspace. Furthermore, it is also argued that IS’ strategy of empowering of unaffiliated sympathizers represents a further development in the evolution of jihadism in cyberspace and can best be understood as an attempt to normalize and legitimize IS’ existence through its efforts to dominate the ‘IS narrative’ across social media platforms.