We analyze 26.2 million comments published in Arabic language on Twitter, from July 2014 to January 2015, when ISIS' strength reached its peak and the group was prominently expanding the territorial area under its control. By doing that, we are able to measure the share of support and aversion toward the Islamic State within the online Arab communities. We then investigate two specific topics. First, by exploiting the time-granularity of the tweets, we link the opinions with daily events to understand the main determinants of the changing trend in support toward ISIS. Second, by taking advantage of the geographical locations of tweets, we explore the relationship between online opinions across countries and the number of foreign fighters joining ISIS.
The rise and fall of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) certainly represents one of the most salient political topics over these last few years (Byman 2016). Just to give an idea, even during the campaign for the 2016 US Presidential elections, Donald Trump repeatedly referred to the need of a new counterterrorism strategy against ISIS and promised to "defeat the ideology of radical Islamic terrorism" (Brands and Feaver 2017: 28).
Due to its fast territorial expansion, to the ostentation of cruelty against prisoners and war victims (Kraidy 2017), but also to its innovative communication skills (Farwell 2014) and, since 2015, to its strategy of frequent “hand-made” terrorist attacks in Western countries, the ISIS repeatedly grasped the media attention.
In the past, terrorist groups usually relied on traditional mass media to spread their message, let us think for instance to Al Qaeda, which addressed the public by sending declarations recorded on video tapes to Al-Jazeera (Klausen 2015). Conversely, the communication strategy adopted by ISIS was rather different. It has been argued that ISIS was the first Islamic terrorist group that made a massive usage of Internet and it used social networking sites to spread its message in order to generate support (Klausen 2015;Novenario 2016) but also for proselytism (Greenberg 2016).
In this regard, the debate around ISIS propaganda on social media, which started in 2014, was one of the first fire alarms related to the potential perils of social media, linked with the idea of the existence of a “dark web” of online crimes and violence. While, since the Arab spring, academic studies were in fact mainly focused on the potential positive effects of social media in terms of democratization (e.g. Howard and Hussain 2011), the rise of ISIS (also online) questioned previous theories suggesting that social media can also produce turmoil and allow some political actors to pursue illiberal goals (Tucker et al. 2017).
For all these reasons, and under the idea that ISIS has been particularly active online to generate consent and raise followers, it is worth investigating social media conversations about ISIS in order to evaluate the degree of support expressed within the online Arabic communities, to inspect what elements are able to affect its support and to link online opinions with offline outcomes, such as the ability to successfully perform proselytism recruiting foreign fighters.
Using a supervised aggregated sentiment analysis approach, we analyzed 26.2 million comments published in Arabic language on Twitter, from July 2014 to January 2015, when ISIS’ strength reached its peak and the group was prominently expanding the territorial area under its control. By doing that, we were able to measure the share of support and aversion toward the Islamic State within the online Arab speaking communities. The fact that the language used by pro-ISIS accounts on Twitter is by far the Arabic one (in over the 90% of the cases; see Siegel and Tucker 2017: 6) makes the choice to focus in the present paper on posts written precisely in Arabic language particularly interesting. By applying statistical analysis to the results of sentiment analysis we investigate two specific topics concerning the conversations on ISIS on-line. First, by exploiting the time-granularity of the tweets, we link the opinions with daily events to understand the main determinants of the changing trend in support toward ISIS. Second, by taking advantage of the geographical locations of tweets, we explore the relationship between online opinions across countries and offline behavior, linking on-line sentiment (i.e., the ratio of positive comments about ISIS: see more below) with data about the number of foreign fighters joining ISIS from those countries.
With respect to the first topic, our analysis show that the expressed on-line support towards ISIS mainly changes according to the specific target of ISIS actions, to military events, to the on-line volume of the discussion about ISIS and to the coverage of media about it. Second, our analysis shows the existence of a robust and negative relationship between the sentiment towards ISIS and the number of foreign fighters in a given country. In this sense, our results appear to unveil the existence of what we have called a “loneliness effect” that could make the “exit” option of becoming a foreign fighter more attractive for some given on-line users. The policy implications of this are far from being trivial: as we will discuss, this finding seems to suggest that censorship is not a solution to counter the ISIS threat: quite the contrary, by decreasing expressed support for the terrorist group, censorship can favor radicalization. This paper is organized as follows. In Section 1, we review the existing literature linking social media and sensitive topics (with an eye to terrorism) and we outline our main research questions and expectations. In Se
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