Measuring the Popular Resonance of Daesh’s Propoganda

Abstract

We describe an innovative approach to social media analysis, combining corpus linguists and statistical methods to measure the resonance of Daesh's propaganda to a sample population (Eqypt). The findings from this research effort demonstrate that: (1) Daesh's messaging is measurable and distinct from other Salafi groups, such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood; (2) while Daesh's messaging generally do not resonate with Egyptians, its uptake increased in Upper Egypt and the Sinai regions during 2014; and (3) this method can be applied more broadly to measure the spread of violent extremist messaging across regional populations over time.

Countering Violent Extremism in the Philippines: A Snapshot of Current Challenges and Responses

“…Resonance analysis works by identifying the distinct language in a group's communications and quantifying the uptake of that language in the general population's social media use-whether people are talking more like the content of a tested communication campaign. Marcellino et al (2017) tested this approach by quantifying the linguistic patterns inherent in communiques of the Islamic State. They compared the linguistic patterns of this content with a longitudinal sample of tweets from 2014 geoinferenced to Egypt.…”

Promoting Peace as the Antidote to Violent Extremism: Evaluation of a Philippines-Based Tech Camp and Peace Promotion Fellowship

“…It also might be possible to study the individuals who follow a fellow's Twitter account. Analysis of their respective Twitter accounts using newly developed lexical tools could document the effects of their Twitter activity (Marcellino et al, 2017).…”

Fatal attraction: explaining variation in the attractiveness of Islamic State propaganda

“…This media organization, and the content it produces, has been the subject of several studies that attempt to categorize the group’s propaganda according to its themes and frequency of release (Derrick et al, 2016; Milton, 2016; Shamieh and Szenes, 2015; Winter, 2015; Zelin, 2015). However, only one study has attempted an empirical exploration of the spread of the Islamic State’s propaganda (Marcellino et al, 2017). It accomplished this by examining the words used by the Islamic State in its propaganda as opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and then assessed how far each of the respective lexicons spread.…”