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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2016 “Examining ISIS Support and Opposition Networks on Twitter.” Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation.
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2016 “Why ISIS’s Message Resonates: Leveraging Islam, Socio-Political Catalysts and Adaptive Messaging.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 39(10): 871–899.
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2015 “A New Sisterhood: The Allure of ISIS in Syria For Young Muslim Women in the UK.” PhD diss., Arizona State University.
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2014 “The Cost of Racial Animus on a Black Candidate: Evidence Using Google Search Data.” Journal of Public Economics, no. 1181: 26–40.
2014 “Retweeting the Caliphate: The Role of Soft-Sympathizers in the Islamic State’s Social Media Strategy.” Paper presented at the 6th International Symposium on Terrorism and Transnational Crime. Antalya, Turkey, December 4–7, 2014.
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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 ► pp. 215824401878922 ff.
2020. ISIS und die Inszenierung von Kulturgüterzerstörung für ein globales Publikum. In Visualität und Weltpolitik [Horizonte der Internationalen Beziehungen, ], ► pp. 151 ff.
Pfeifer, Hanna & Alexander Spencer
2019. Once upon a time. Journal of Language and Politics 18:1 ► pp. 21 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.
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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.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 april 2022. 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.
