How successful is the Islamic State’s online strategy? To what extent does the organization achieve its goals of attracting a global audience, broadcasting its military successes, and marketing the Caliphate? Using Twitter and YouTube search data, collected throughout 2015 and early 2016, we assess how suspected ISIS accounts, sympathizers, and opponents behave across two social media platforms, offering key insights into the successes and limitations of ISIS’s information warfare strategy. Analyzing the tweet content and metadata from 16,364 suspected ISIS accounts, we find that a core network of ISIS Twitter users are producing linguistically diverse narratives, touting battlefield victories and depicting utopian life in the Caliphate. Furthermore, a dataset of over 70 million tweets, as well as analysis YouTube search data, indicates that although pro-ISIS content spreads globally and remains on message, it is far less prolific than anti-ISIS content. However, this anti-ISIS content is not necessarily anti-extremist or aligned with Western policy goals.
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Cited by (17)
Cited by 17 other publications
Knuppe, Austin J. & Matthew Nanes
2024. When Bullets and Ballots Collide: How the Dissolution of the Anti-Islamic State Coalition Stalled Iraq’s Transition to Peacetime. Civil Wars 26:2 ► pp. 248 ff.
Bastos, Marco, Dan Mercea & Fábio Goveia
2023. Guy next door and implausibly attractive young women: The visual frames of social media propaganda. New Media & Society 25:8 ► pp. 2014 ff.
Mohiuddin, Asif
2023. Islamism in the Digital Age: The Role of Cyberspace in Transforming Religious Authority. In Navigating Religious Authority in Muslim Societies, ► pp. 203 ff.
Tucker, Joshua A.
2023. Computational Social Science for Policy and Quality of Democracy: Public Opinion, Hate Speech, Misinformation, and Foreign Influence Campaigns. In Handbook of Computational Social Science for Policy, ► pp. 381 ff.
Colombo, Matteo & Luigi Curini
2022. A Thematic Study of the Topics in the Pro-IS and Anti-IS Tweets. In Discussing the Islamic State on Twitter [Middle East Today, ], ► pp. 81 ff.
Colombo, Matteo & Luigi Curini
2022. The Research Methodology. In Discussing the Islamic State on Twitter [Middle East Today, ], ► pp. 23 ff.
Colombo, Matteo & Luigi Curini
2022. Detecting the Sentiment Toward IS and Its Evolution. In Discussing the Islamic State on Twitter [Middle East Today, ], ► pp. 49 ff.
Colombo, Matteo & Luigi Curini
2022. Introduction. In Discussing the Islamic State on Twitter [Middle East Today, ], ► pp. 1 ff.
Colombo, Matteo & Luigi Curini
2022. The Enemy of My Enemy? Hostility and Sectarian Discourse Between Pro-IS and Anti-IS Arabic-Speaking Twitter Users. In Discussing the Islamic State on Twitter [Middle East Today, ], ► pp. 115 ff.
Romney, David, Amaney A Jamal, Robert O Keohane & Dustin Tingley
2021. The Enemy of My Enemy Is Not My Friend: Arabic Twitter Sentiment toward ISIS and the United States. International Studies Quarterly 65:4 ► pp. 1176 ff.
Pfeifer, Hanna & Christoph Günther
2020. ISIS und die Inszenierung von Kulturgüterzerstörung für ein globales Publikum. In Visualität und Weltpolitik [Horizonte der Internationalen Beziehungen, ], ► pp. 151 ff.
SIEGEL, ALEXANDRA A. & VIVIENNE BADAAN
2020. #No2Sectarianism: Experimental Approaches to Reducing Sectarian Hate Speech Online. American Political Science Review 114:3 ► pp. 837 ff.
Wagnsson, Charlotte
2020. What is at stake in the information sphere? Anxieties about malign information influence among ordinary Swedes. European Security 29:4 ► pp. 397 ff.
Abdelzaher, Esra’ M. & Bacem A. Essam
2019. Weaponizing words. Journal of Language and Politics 18:6 ► pp. 893 ff.
Ceron, Andrea, Luigi Curini & Stefano M. Iacus
2019. ISIS at Its Apogee: The Arabic Discourse on Twitter and What We Can Learn From That About ISIS Support and Foreign Fighters. Sage Open 9:1
Pfeifer, Hanna & Alexander Spencer
2019. Once upon a time. Journal of Language and Politics 18:1 ► pp. 21 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 9 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.
