|
|||||||||
MENUHOMEDAILY BRIEF LATEST POSTS J.M. BERGER ISIS: STATE OF TERROR JIHAD JOE LINKSBlogs of WarHizballah Cavalcade Internet Haganah Jihadology Jihadica Kremlin Trolls Making Sense of Jihad Selected Wisdom Views from the Occident TAGSAmerican TerroristsAnwar Awlaki Al Qaeda AQAP American Al Qaeda Members Inspire Magazine Revolution Muslim OKBOMB |
News, documents and analysis on violent extremismWednesday, October 22, 2014
IS closes in on JN in hashtag battle, but attention is dividedThe Islamic State made some progress in closing the legitimacy gap with Jabhat al Nusra, according to the latest analysis of hashtags used by a social network connected to global jihadist financiers, but the network's overall focus has declined considerably in recent weeks.For the last post in this series, click here.  Overall, hashtags referencing both Jabhat al Nusra and the Islamic State by name declined notably. This appears to be related to declining interest from the financier community, rather than a decline in overall activity in the network, which remained about the same. The chart below shows the distribution of hashtags used more than 200 times from the last period to this period; you can see that content was less viral overall, with fewer hashtags in the upper echelons and more in the lower. This shift may skew some of the numbers in the chart above toward IS, whose content tends to be more viral.  In terms of sentiment, references to the Islamic State by its proper name started to close the gap with al Nusra, increasing during a period that overall totals declined, while references to IS using the derogatory "Daash" declined significantly. This may suggest that IS is becoming a normalized part of the jihadi global community (an outcome suggested by Thomas Hegghammer some months ago), but it's probably wise to treat these numbers cautiously, since there have been similar fluctuations in the past (see the July 24 numbers, for instance).  
Methodology: I looked at the most recent 200 tweets from approximately 7,600 Twitter accounts that were followed by 21 prominent jihadist fundraisers on Twitter (as well as the tweets of the fundraisers themselves), analyzing a total of somewhat less than 3 million tweets for each collection period, which included a substantial amount of overlap from one period to the next.
From those tweets, I extracted the most popular Arabic hashtags used by members of the network to refer to jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq. Two of the original seed accounts were suspended by Twitter over the course of the study, but there is so much overlap among the accounts that it made only a fraction of a percent of difference in the number of tweets examined. RECENT PUBLICATIONS Views expressed on INTELWIRE are those of the author alone.
Tweets referencing this post:loading..
|
BOOKS"...smart, granular analysis..."ISIS: The State of Terror 
"Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger's new book, "ISIS," should be required reading for every politician and policymaker... Their smart, granular analysis is a bracing antidote to both facile dismissals and wild exaggerations... a nuanced and readable account of the ideological and organizational origins of the group." -- Washington Post
More on ISIS: The State of Terror "...a timely warning..."  Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam:
"At a time when some politicians and pundits blur the line between Islam and terrorism, Berger, who knows this subject far better than the demagogues, sharply cautions against vilifying Muslim Americans. ... It is a timely warning from an expert who has not lost his perspective." -- New York Times More on Jihad Joe ABOUT
RECENTNewest posts!Document: CENTCOM Response to Awlaki, AQAP Threat Versus Impact Resistible Force Meets Movable Object ISIS: The State of Terror Jihadist Hostages and the Shape of Things to Come 10 Things You Need to Know About Reporting on Terr... H.P. Lovecraft Evil-O-Matic, ISIS Edition For Global Jihadist Supporters, Islamic State's Ma... Zawahiri Falls Off The Map, Is Rebuked By Top Al N... What's In a Name? EXCLUSIVESNew York Pipe Bomb Suspect Linked to Revolution Muslim The Utility of Lone Wolves Interview with Online Jihadist Abu Suleiman Al Nasser A Way Forward for CVE: The Five Ds How Terrorists Use The Internet: Just Like You PATCON: The FBI's Secret War on the Militia Movement Interview About Jihad With Controversial Cleric Bilal Philips Forgeries on the Jihadist Forums U.S. Gave Millions To Charity Linked To Al Qaeda, Anwar Awlaki State Department Secretly Met With Followers of Blind Sheikh State Department Put 'Political Pressure' On FBI To Deport Brother-in-Law Of Osama Bin Laden In 1995 FBI Records Reveal Details Of Nixon-Era Racial Profiling Program Targeting Arabs Gaza Flotilla Official Was Foreign Fighter in Bosnia War U.S. Had 'High Confidence' Of UBL Attack In June 2001 Behind the Handshake: The Rumsfeld-Saddam Meeting |
|||||||
