"The ISIS Twitter Census," written by J.M. Berger, a non-resident fellow at Brookings, and Johnathon Morgan, a technologist with CrisisNET, evaluated some 20,000 of these accounts to try to understand how they operated.
They found that the typical Islamic State-tweeter was probably located in Syria or Iraq (though accounts were found as far away as Brazil) and that on average they had around 1,000 followers. Three-quarters had Arabic selected as their primary language, while almost one in five had selected English.
The users include a disciplined core group that sends messages frequently and understands how to maximize its effect.
"This activity, more than any other, drives the success of ISIS’s efforts to promulgate its message on social media," the report noted. "Short, prolonged bursts of activity cause hashtags to trend, resulting in third-party aggregation and insertion of tweeted content into search results."
“Jihadists will exploit any kind of technology that will work to their advantage,” said Berger. But the Islamic State, he said, “is much more successful than other groups.”
The group has used the social network to publicize executions of prisoners, including beheadings and at least one immolation, and to espouse death, violence, and hatred.
The release of the study came as Twitter, which has more than 288 million active users worldwide, has suspended thousands of accounts linked to the Islamic State.
The report also asserted that at least 1,000 accounts supportive of the Islamic State, and possibly many more, were suspended by Twitter between September and December.
Twitter’s crackdown on the group has led to death threats against the company’s leaders and employees.
Berger said the threats against Twitter reflected, to some degree, the Islamic State’s increased reliance on open social media forums.
“ISIS has been able to exert an outsized impact on how the world perceives it,” the study said.
Berger and Morgan conclude that while the suspensions limit the success of the Islamic State in spreading its message on Twitter, they fail to completely wipe out propaganda efforts on the services.
`IS has been able to exert an outsized impact on how the world perceives it,` the The ISIS Twitter Census says
Executives at Twitter, which did not provide assistance for the report, said the study had significantly underestimated the number of suspensions. They declined to comment on the report’s specific findings.
But the company said in a statement, “We review all reported content against our rules, which prohibit unlawful use and direct, specific threats of violence against others.”
Berger said a crackdown was “easier said than done.” With 288 million accounts, he said, “you don’t have the manpower to go into every one of their accounts and determine their origin.”
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