https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4216-8592
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Abstract
This article contributes to the growing literature on extremist and terrorist online ecologies and approaches to snapshotting these. It opens by measuring Twitter’s differential disruption of so-called “Islamic State” versus other jihadi parties to the Syria conflict, showing that while Twitter became increasingly inhospitable to IS in 2017 and 2018, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and Ahrar al-Sham retained strong communities on the platform during the same period. An analysis of the same groups’ Twitter out-linking activity has the twofold purpose of determining the reach of groups’ content by quantifying the number of platforms it was available on and analyzing the nature and functionalities of the online spaces out-linked to.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Maura Conway, Moign Khawaja, Suraj Lakhani, Jeremy Reffin, Andrew Robertson, and David Weir, “Disrupting Daesh: Measuring Takedown of Online Terrorist Material and Its Impacts,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 42, no. 1–2 (2018): 141–160.
2 Ibid., 146–148 and 150–152.
3 Ibid., 152–153.
4 Ibid., 152 and 157; see also Maura Conway, “Determining the Role of the Internet in Violent Extremism and Terrorism: Six Suggestions for Progressing Research,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 40, no. 1 (2017): 85 and 88.
5 Ken Wolf, “An Analysis of Islamic State Propaganda Distribution,” Flashpoint, 2018, 8, accessed May 18, 2020, https://go.flashpoint-intel.com/docs/an-analysis-of-islamic-state-propaganda-distribution.
6 Bennett Clifford, “‘Trucks, Knives, Bombs, Whatever’: Exploring Pro-Islamic State Instructional Material on Telegram,” CTC Sentinel 11, no. 5 (2018): 23–29.
7 Facebook, “What Types of Organizations Aren’t Allowed on Facebook?”, Facebook Help, n.d., accessed May 18, 2020, https://www.facebook.com/help/1738430046395200?helpref=related.
8 Maura Conway, “Routing the Extreme Right: Challenges for Social Media Platforms,” RUSI Journal 165, no. 1 (2020): 3.
9 Casey Man Kong Lum, “Introduction: The Intellectual Roots of Media Ecology,” New Jersey Journal of Communication 8, no. 1 (2000): 1–7.
10 Akil Awan, Andrew Hoskins, and Ben O’Loughlin, Radicalisation and the Media: Connectivity and Terrorism in the New Media Ecology (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).
11 Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 47.
12 Bennett Clifford and Helen Powell, “Encrypted Extremism: Inside the English-Speaking Islamic State Ecosystem on Telegram” (Washington, DC: GWU Program on Extremism, 2019), accessed May 18, 2020, https://extremism.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs2191/f/EncryptedExtremism.pdf; Stuart Macdonald, Daniel Grinnell, Anina Kinzel, and Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, “Daesh, Twitter and the Social Media Ecosystem: A Study of Outlinks Contained in Tweets Mentioning Rumiyah,” RUSI Journal 164, no. 4 (2019): 60–72. See also Ali Fisher, Nico Prucha, and Emily Winterbotham, “Mapping the Jihadist Information Ecosystem: Towards the Next Generation of Disruption Capability” (RUSI, London: GNET, 2019), accessed May 18, 2020, https://rusi.org/sites/default/files/20190716_grntt_paper_06.pdf; Niall F. Johnson, Minzhang Zheng, Yulia Vorobyeva, Andrew Gabriel, Hong Qi, Nicolás Velásquez, Pedro Manrique, Douglas Johnson, Elvira María Restrepo, and Chaoming Song. “New Online Ecology of Adversarial Aggregates: ISIS and Beyond,” Nature 352, no. 6292 (2016): 1459–63.
13 Conway et al. “Disrupting Daesh: Measuring Takedown of Online Terrorist Material and Its Impacts”.
14 HTS has often been referred to as al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate, but this is challenged by some analysts, who also view it as much more Syria- than global-focused; see, for example, Tore Refslund Hamming and Pieter Van Ostaeyen, “The True Story of al-Qaeda’s Demise and Resurgence in Syria,” Lawfare, April 8, 2018, accessed May 18, 2020, https://www.lawfareblog.com/true-story-al-qaedas-demise-and-resurgence-syria; and Charles Lister, “US Officials Just Mislabeled a Syrian Terror Group as al Qaeda. Worse, They’re Missing a Far Bigger Threat,” Defense One, June 1, 2018, accessed May 18, 2020, https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2018/06/us-officials-just-mislabeled-syrian-group-al-qaeda-worse-theyre-missing-far-bigger-threat/148656/. It is worth noting here too that a new group composing al-Qaeda loyalists and known as Tandhim Hurras al-Deen—the “far bigger threat” referred to by Lister—was established at the end of February 2018 and it is this group that is now viewed by many as al-Qaeda’s de facto Syria branch.
15 Syria Study Group, “Final Report and Recommendations” (Washington DC: USIP, 2019), 22, accessed May 18, 2020, https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/Syria%20Study%20Group%20Final%20Report.pdf.
16 Nusra Front is one of the former designations of HTS. Bassem Mroue, “One of Syria’s Most Powerful Rebel Groups is Rebranding itself with Turkey’s Backing,” Business Insider, October 8, 2015, accessed May 18, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/ahrar-al-sham-in-syria-and-turkey-2015-10?r=US&IR=T; see also CISAC, “Ahrar al-Sham,” (Mapping Militant Organisations: Stanford University, 2017), accessed May 18, 2020, https://web.stanford.edu/group/mappingmilitants/cgi-bin/groups/view/523.
17 Hamming and Van Ostaeyen, “The True Story of al-Qaeda’s Demise and Resurgence in Syria.”
18 Implemented using the Method52 social media analysis platform; for more information on this, see www.taglaboratory.org.
19 Conway et al. “Disrupting Daesh: Measuring Takedown of Online Terrorist Material and Its Impacts.”
20 Our approach was very similar to that detailed in Valentine Crosset, Samuel Tanner, and Aurélie Campana, “Researching Far Right Groups on Twitter: Methodological Challenges 2.0,” New Media & Society 21, no. 4 (2019): 939–61.
21 For more, see Deven Parekh, Amarnath Amarasingam, Lorne Dawson and Derek Ruths, “Studying Jihadists on Social Media: A Critique of Data Collection Methodologies,” Perspectives on Terrorism 12, no. 3 (2018): 3–21, in which our methodology is discussed and compared with others. See also Margeret Hall, Michael Logan, Gina S. Ligon, and Douglas C. Derrick, “Do Machines Replicate Humans? Toward a Unified Understanding of Radicalizing Content on the Open Social Web,” Policy & Internet 12, no. 1 (2020): 109–138.
22 Any Twitter account can choose to follow another account.
23 Accounts that had more than 5,000 followers were also excluded in order to focus the analysis on ‘local’ inter-personal relations rather than on ‘celebrities’ or other types of high-profile accounts, which were followed by a wide range of interested parties (e.g. other parties to the conflict, journalists, researchers, etc.).
24 These included accounts that regretted or condemned the infighting between HTS and Ahrar and urged unity in the fight against their common enemy (i.e. the Syrian regime); accounts that praised influential Islamic scholars (e.g. Saudi cleric Sheikh Abdullah Al Moheisany) who were trying to mediate between HTS and Ahrar; and accounts that were supportive of groups such as Jaish al-Izzah who refused to take sides and focused on attacking the regime.
25 J. M. Berger and Jonathon Morgan, “The ISIS Twitter Census: Defining and Describing the Population of ISIS Supporters on Twitter” (Washington DC: Brookings, 2015), 23, accessed May 18, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/is,is_twitter_census_berger_morgan.pdf.
26 Conway et al., “Disrupting Daesh: Measuring Takedown of Online Terrorist Material and Its Impacts,” 8–9 and 16.
27 This account was active at the time of data collection and remained active on 1 April 2020, showing 26.6K followers, but with no bio any longer appearing. Worth noting here too is that Jaber Ali Basha took over leadership of JTS from Soufan in August 2018. Basha’s official Twitter account, @JaberAliBasha, had 8,998 followers on 1 April 2020 and an Arabic language bio reading “General Commander of the Islamic Movement of Ahrar al-Sham.”
28 Khattab’s account remained available on 1 June 2019, but with the most recent tweet from 4 February 2018, and just 1,833 followers.
29 Clifford, “‘Trucks, Knives, Bombs, Whatever’: Exploring Pro-Islamic State Instructional Material on Telegram.”
30 Conway et al., “Disrupting Daesh: Measuring Takedown of Online Terrorist Material and Its Impacts,” 6–7 and 12.
31 Conway et al., “Disrupting Daesh: Measuring Takedown of Online Terrorist Material and Its Impacts.”
32 The Nour al-Din al-Zinki Movement was a Syrian Islamist group with previously close ties to, amongst others, HTS, which together with AAS coalesced into JTS in February 2018.
33 It is worth noting that linking is not the only way in which tweet content can be augmented. Tweets can contain embedded images and videos (“mediaURLs”) which can be viewed directly within the tweet without the need to be directed to some other site or platform via a link. The use of embedded photos and (more rarely) videos is common practice. As with Twitter in-linking, embedding content does not take users outside Twitter and is therefore not considered further here.
34 Worth acknowledging here is the difficulty of classifying some platforms that overlap our categories. For example, we classified YouTube as a Social Media platform with the purpose of Video Sharing rather than a Content Hosting site; conversely Samantha Weirman and Audrey Alexander in their “Research Note: Hyperlinked Sympathizers—URLs and the Islamic State” (Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 43, no. 3 (2020): 239–57) categorise YouTube—along with justpaste.it, archive.org, vid.me, and soundcloud.com—as a file-sharing “base domain” (ibid: 247). We based our classification decisions on a combination of the platforms’ self-descriptions and the company descriptors supplied by Google Finance. Prominent on YouTube’s About page is its self-description as a place to “listen, share and build community;” Google Finance categorises YouTube as a “video sharing company.”
35 See https://telegram.org/.
36 Google Finance classifies Telegram as simply “software.”
37 Mia Bloom, Hicham Tiflati, and John Horgan “Navigating ISIS’s Preferred Platform: Telegram,” Terrorism and Political Violence 31, no. 6 (2019): 1242–1254. See also Nick Robins-Early, “How Telegram Became the App of Choice For ISIS,” HuffPost, May 24, 2017, accessed May 19, 2020, https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/isis-telegram-app_n_59259254e4b0ec129d3136d5?ri18n=true; Laura Smith, “Messaging App Telegram Centrepiece of IS Social Media Strategy,” BBC News, June 5, 2017, accessed May 18, 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-39743252.
38 This matches previous findings; see Conway et al. “Disrupting Daesh: Measuring Takedown of Online Terrorist Material and Its Impacts,” 13.
39 Online recommender systems present content to users of specific platforms that they might not otherwise locate based on, for example, prior search or viewing history on that platform. See Derek O’Callaghan, Derek Greene, Maura Conway, Joe Carthy, and Pádraig Cunningham, “Down the (White) Rabbit Hole: The Extreme Right and Online Recommender Systems,” Social Science Computer Review 33, no. 4 (2015): 559–78.
40 Similar findings have been demonstrated in related research; see, for example, Weirman and Alexander “Research Note: Hyperlinked Sympathizers—URLs and the Islamic State”; Wolf, “An Analysis of Islamic State Propaganda Distribution”.
41 For more, see https://www.techagainstterrorism.org.
42 Maura Conway, “Violent Extremism and Terrorism Online In 2016: The Year in Review” (Dublin: VOX-Pol, 2016), 11–12, accessed May 18, 2020, https://www.voxpol.eu/download/vox-pol_publication/Year-In-Review-WEB.pdf.
43 J. M. Berger, “The Alt-Right Twitter Census Defining and Describing the Audience for Alt Right Content on Twitter” (Dublin: VOX-Pol, 2018), accessed May 18, 2020, https://www.voxpol.eu/download/vox-pol_publication/AltRightTwitterCensus.pdf.