IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0181405.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Online extremism and the communities that sustain it: Detecting the ISIS supporting community on Twitter

Author

Listed:
  • Matthew C Benigni
  • Kenneth Joseph
  • Kathleen M Carley

Abstract

The Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS) continues to use social media as an essential element of its campaign to motivate support. On Twitter, ISIS’ unique ability to leverage unaffiliated sympathizers that simply retweet propaganda has been identified as a primary mechanism in their success in motivating both recruitment and “lone wolf” attacks. The present work explores a large community of Twitter users whose activity supports ISIS propaganda diffusion in varying degrees. Within this ISIS supporting community, we observe a diverse range of actor types, including fighters, propagandists, recruiters, religious scholars, and unaffiliated sympathizers. The interaction between these users offers unique insight into the people and narratives critical to ISIS’ sustainment. In their entirety, we refer to this diverse set of users as an online extremist community or OEC. We present Iterative Vertex Clustering and Classification (IVCC), a scalable analytic approach for OEC detection in annotated heterogeneous networks, and provide an illustrative case study of an online community of over 22,000 Twitter users whose online behavior directly advocates support for ISIS or contibutes to the group’s propaganda dissemination through retweets.

Suggested Citation

  • Matthew C Benigni & Kenneth Joseph & Kathleen M Carley, 2017. "Online extremism and the communities that sustain it: Detecting the ISIS supporting community on Twitter," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(12), pages 1-23, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0181405
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0181405
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0181405
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0181405&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0181405?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jose N. Paredes & Gerardo I. Simari & Maria Vanina Martinez & Marcelo A. Falappa, 2021. "NetDER: An Architecture for Reasoning About Malicious Behavior," Information Systems Frontiers, Springer, vol. 23(1), pages 185-201, February.
    2. Ozan Candogan & Nicole Immorlica & Bar Light & Jerry Anunrojwong, 2022. "Social Learning under Platform Influence: Consensus and Persistent Disagreement," Papers 2202.12453, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2023.
    3. Moradi, Mehdi & Parsa, Saeed, 2019. "An evolutionary method for community detection using a novel local search strategy," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 523(C), pages 457-475.
    4. Matthew Benigni & Kenneth Joseph & Kathleen M. Carley, 2018. "Mining online communities to inform strategic messaging: practical methods to identify community-level insights," Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, Springer, vol. 24(2), pages 224-242, June.
    5. Rahma Sugihartati & Bagong Suyanto & Mun’im Sirry, 2020. "The Shift from Consumers to Prosumers: Susceptibility of Young Adults to Radicalization," Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 9(4), pages 1-15, April.
    6. Kathleen M. Carley, 2020. "Social cybersecurity: an emerging science," Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, Springer, vol. 26(4), pages 365-381, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0181405. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.