Terrorists’ Social Media Output Under Scrutiny
The Israeli anti-terror organizations are using special “filters” to try and get pre-warning about terror groups from social media.
A United Nations panel asked social-media companies such as Twitter and Facebook to respond to how terrorist groups use their networks to spread propaganda or recruit members with increasing success.
As these terrorist groups, such as ISIS or al-Qaeda, evolve their social-media skills, Arizona State University (ASU) will be part of a team monitoring their advancements and trying to determine how their online actions can be negated. ASU is leading a group project that has been awarded a Minerva grant to study of what types of information go viral online, and what types of actions or responses can halt the spread of viral information.
The Minerva Initiative is a Department of Defense-sponsored, university-based social-science research initiative launched by the secretary of Defense in 2008. It focuses on areas of strategic importance to US national security.
An ASU release reports that this grant will allow the team, which includes people from the US Military Academy and Britain’s University of Exeter, to study information cascades, trends marked by people ignoring their own knowledge or information in favor of suggestions from other people’s actions, as they relate to the social-media posts of terrorist networks.
“The first phase of the project is we are trying to understand what goes viral. Viral messages are driven by two things, what type of content, and what type of network. The right content and the right types of networks are going to resonate and spread and maybe gain new followers,” said Hasan Davulcu, the project’s principal investigator.
Once they understand the information cascade, Davulcu said they might be able to determine how to counter the viral messages. But, he says, this study will not include developing content to thwart online terrorism. Rather, the team will be observing what organic information created by social-media users tends to halt terrorists’ viral content.
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