Examining ISIS Support and Opposition Networks on Twitter

Monitoring Social Media: Lessons for Future Department of Defense Social Media Analysis in Support of Information Operations

“…This approach is a way to visualize not only who is talking to whom but also what they are talking (and care) about. The result was a social media map of the argument space around ISIL (Bodine- Baron, Helmus, et al, 2016). Figure 3.1 shows a map of the top-level metacommunities discovered in that study, along with the density and direction of connections between them.…”

“…Beyond describing the social networks of an extremist group like ISIL, the combination of SNA and lexical analysis can be used to characterize the ideological struggle over ISIL occurring on social media (Bodine- Baron, Helmus, et al, 2016). 4 This approach uses a community detection algorithm to identify the groups involved and lexical analysis to characterize those communities.…”

“…The first step in this approach is to collect social media data about an issue or entity of interest-in this case, more than 23 million tweets from more than 770,000 Twitter supporters and opponents of ISIL (Bodine- Baron, Helmus, et al, 2016). Domain experts suggested relevant search terms to identify likely supporters and opponents of ISIL: phrase and hashtag variants of both Daesh and the Islamic Caliphate in Arabic.…”

“…Returning to our original example of discerning ISIL supporters on Twitter, SNA showed four large metacommunities, which lexical analysis could characterize as metapublics (Bodine-Baron, Helmus, et al, 2016). One community was marked by keywords and collocates reflecting Saudi concerns (including Saudi nationalism), negative secular or religious words about ISIL (terrorists, crimes and sins, excommunicates, fitna), and some positive words with religious connotations (praise, glory, truth, love).…”

Empowering ISIL Opponents

“…In 2015, the RAND Corporation funded a study to examine the networks of ISIS supporters and opponents on Twitter, the results of which were published in 2016. 1 That study found that, despite overwhelming numbers, opponents to ISIS are deeply fractured along both sectarian and national lines, while ISIS supporters, though fewer in number, are more coordinated and sophisticated in their use of social media.…”