ISIS at Its Apogee: The Arabic Discourse on Twitter and What We Can Learn From That About ISIS Support and Foreign Fighters

Andrea Ceron, Luigi Curini and Stefano Iacus ()

SAGE Open, 2019, vol. 9, issue 1, 2158244018789229

Abstract: We analyze 26.2 million comments published in Arabic language on Twitter, from July 2014 to January 2015, when Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)’s strength reached its peak and the group was prominently expanding the territorial area under its control. By doing that, we are able to measure the share of support and aversion toward the Islamic State within the online Arab communities. We then investigate two specific topics. First, by exploiting the time granularity of the tweets, we link the opinions with daily events to understand the main determinants of the changing trend in support toward ISIS. Second, by taking advantage of the geographical locations of tweets, we explore the relationship between online opinions across countries and the number of foreign fighters joining ISIS.

Keywords: sentiment analysis; ISIS; foreign fighters; Arabic social media; terrorism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:sagope:v:9:y:2019:i:1:p:2158244018789229

DOI: 10.1177/2158244018789229

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