Online Library

On how participation via Internet and social media transform cultural production

The current foreign fighter problem has received significant global media attention. Why and how do individuals from relatively affluent Western countries travel to poor and war torn countries to fight in a foreign war? How do social media and the internet impact the process? Ultimately, fighting in a foreign war requires the will and ability to participate, which in turn requires that an individual overcome significant psychological and physical barriers. The process of overcoming these participation barriers and thus the process of becoming a foreign fighter, hinges on four key factors: transnational ideology, close-knit social groups, and transnational resource networks, and a foreign sponsor facilitates the process by integrating the other three factors. Prior to social media and the internet, this process worked through local networks with face-to-face interaction. With the spread of social media and the internet, these networks and interactions have become increasingly global and virtual, increasing audience numbers but also increasing state ability to intervene. Analyzing globalization’s impact, including what has changed and what has stayed the same, is important to understanding the foreign fighter phenomenon both now and in the future.

The growing use of the Internet as a major means of communication has led to the formation of cyber-communities, which have become increasingly appealing to violent extremists due to the unregulated nature of Internet communication. Online communities enable violent extremists to increase recruitment by allowing them to build personal relationships with a worldwide audience capable of accessing uncensored content. This research presents methods for identifying and forecasting the recruitment activities of violent groups within extremist social media websites. Specifically, these methods employ techniques within supervised learning and natural language processing for automatically: (1) identifying forum posts intended to recruit new violent extremist members, and (2) forecasting recruitment efforts by tracking changes in an online community’s discussion over time. We used data from the western jihadist website Ansar AlJihad Network, which was compiled by the University of Arizona’s Dark Web Project. Multiple judges manually annotated a sample of these data, marking 192 randomly sampled posts as recruiting (Yes) or non-recruiting (No). We observed significant agreement between the judges’ labels; the confidence interval of Cohen’s kappa was (0.5,0.9) at p=0.01. We used naive Bayes models, logistic regression, classification trees, boosting, and support vector machines (SVM) to classify the forum posts in a 10-fold cross-validation experimental setup. Evaluation with receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves show that our SVM classifier achieves 89% area under the curve (AUC), a significant improvement over the 63% AUC performance achieved by our simplest naive Bayes model (Tukey’s test at p=0.05). The forecasting task uses a time series regression analysis to model the daily count of extremist recruitment posts. Evaluation with mean absolute scaled error (MASE) shows that employing latent topics as predictors can reduce forecast error compared to a naive (random-walk) model and the baseline time series model. To our knowledge, these are the first results reported on these tasks, and our analysis indicates that automatic detection and forecasting of online terrorist recruitment are feasible tasks. This research could ultimately help identify the impact of violent organizations, like terrorist groups, within the social network of an online community. There are also a number of important areas of future work including classifying non-English posts and measuring how recruitment posts and current events change membership numbers over time.

Terrorism. Why does this word grab our attention so? Propaganda machines have adopted modern technology as a means to always have their content available. Regardless of the hour or time zone, information is being shared by somebody, somewhere. Social media is a game changer influencing the way in which terror groups are changing their tactics and also how their acts of terror are perceived by the members of the public they intend to influence.

This book explores how social media adoption by terrorists interacts with privacy law, freedom of expression, data protection and surveillance legislation through an exploration of the fascinating primary resources themselves, covering everything from the Snowden Leaks, the rise of ISIS to Charlie Hebdo. The book also covers lesser worn paths such as the travel guide that proudly boasts that you can get Bounty and Twix bars mid-conflict, and the best local hair salons for jihadi brides. These vignettes, amongst the many others explored in this volume bring to life the legal, policy and ethical debates considered in this volume, representing an important part in the development of understanding terrorist narratives on social media, by framing the legislative debate.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

This research aims to compile data and information that will contribute to understanding the online radicalization phenomenon through translation. There are many studies on using the internet and propaganda in a terrorism context. However, only a handful studied the correlation between translation and terrorism propaganda, especially in Indonesia. There was little discussion on the role of translation in bridging communication between different nations, cultures, and languages and using it to propagate radical/propaganda narratives worldwide and amplify those messages to its target audience. The research method is descriptive qualitative using primary and secondary data; the sample is taken from the book of Nadharat Fi Al Ijma’ Al Qath’i and previous findings and news. This research revealed at least ten roles of translation in the online radicalization phenomenon; among others, translation in the target language can be used to identify the target audience of the propagandist, and many terrorist sympathizers were willing to volunteer to translate the propaganda. However, although the translation is used to leverage the spread of propaganda, it can also assist law enforcement officers in combating terrorist/propaganda narratives. Indonesian law enforcement officers may use translation to counter-terrorism as Indonesia has hundreds of vernacular languages that can be used to ‘encrypt’ and disseminate their extremist narratives.