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India-based Ankit Shukla demystifies the spread of the militant virus, called ISIS, on Twitter using a data-backed approach

The author Ankit Shukla is President of E-Cell, ABV-Indian Institute of Information Technology & Management, Gwalior. He can be reached at ankit@in7h.com. Connect with him on Facebook and Linkedin.

Since the later half of last decade, terror outfits such as al-Qaeda, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and their affiliates started misusing the Internet (mainly social networks like Twitter), thanks to their massive reach.

They used and are still using misleading content to incite fear among people, as well as to disseminate their violent propaganda. They also used these popular online platforms as recruitment channels.

As and when various social media giants tried their best to block the users of accounts of various extremist outfits and their followers, new accounts popped up (these new accounts need an adequate amount of time to build the massive reach again whatsoever).

This study is based on a list of ISIS-operated or affiliated Twitter accounts released by xOPERATIONSx. I have applied some data analysis to these user accounts to crunch some numbers and tried to quantify the overall effect.

The flow of this long study are:

• Introduction
• Sources of data
• Summary of stats
• Age of ISIS-pro and follower accounts on Twitter
• Distribution of retweets of pro-ISIS and their followers
• Most popular hashtags used by pro-ISIS and their followers
• Popular platforms used by pro-ISIS and their followers to send tweets
• Top websites mentioned by pro-ISIS and followers in their tweets
• Languages used by pro-ISIS and followers in their tweets
• Day-wise distribution of number of tweets
• Distribution of number of followers of followers of pro-ISIS accounts

Sources of data

The list of around 140 pro-ISIS accounts was made public by a group called ‘Anonymous’ on the last week of November 2015. More names were made public, but this particular post is based only on the one list shared by @xoperationsx.

Please note that although Twitter says that the list could be highly inaccurate, the tweets from these accounts definitely show some links with ISIS.

Each and every data was collected by myself using fundamental tools, such as Twitter API, MySQL, PHP and JavaScript.

The followers of around 35,000 of all these accounts are also exhaustively studied, as we can safely assume that they are either the immediate target for ISIS recruitments or have already been entrapped.

Total accounts analysed: 140

Of these 140, I could only publicly access 110 accounts. This could mean that either the other 30 were taken down by Twitter or had strict privacy settings.

To keep the study as recent as possible, I studied a maximum of the latest 30 to 50 tweets from each account

This list primarily contained accounts from Indonesia, so the study is somewhat biased around this fact.

We considered two types of accounts —Pro-ISIS accounts (primary list of the so called ISIS supporter accounts made public by @xoperationsx) and Followers of Pro-ISIS (accounts which directly follow pro-ISIS accounts on Twitter).

Summary of stats

Total number of pro-ISIS accounts analysed: 110

Total number of tweets from pro-ISIS accounts analysed: 2,875 from 84 accounts (other accounts either haven’t tweeted once or have strict privacy settings)

Total number of follower accounts of pro-ISIS accounts analysed: 35,000

Total number of tweets from the follower accounts analysed: 729,536 from 22,469 accounts (other accounts either haven’t tweeted once or have strict privacy settings)

About 50 per cent of the pro-ISIS accounts are less than a year old.

About 50 per cent of the follower accounts are more than a year old, some are even 6-8 years old.

About 40 per cent of pro-ISIS tweets received at least one retweet, and about 2 per cent of them got as many as 60 retweets.

About 175,000 tweets of pro-ISIS followers received more than 10 retweets.

The hashtags used by pro-ISIS accounts and follower accounts are highly similar.

Android, Twitter Web Client and BlackBerry were the most favourite platforms for pro-ISIS accounts to post tweets, while other services like IFTTT, Crowd Fire and Tweet Deck were also used.

iPhone became one of the primary sources for followers to send tweets, and a range of other third-party services were also used.

Pro-ISIS and their followers mentioned a large number of websites, the popular among them being YouTube, Justpaste.it and Facebook.

As this data is mostly centred around Indonesian accounts, the most used language was Bahasa followed by English, Arabic and French.

The tweets were almost uniformly divided across all the days of the week, with some high activity seen on Fridays and Saturdays by both pro-ISIS and follower accounts.

About 40 per cent 35,000 followers of pro-ISIS accounts have more than 100 followers and 5.68 per cent have more than 1,000 followers. These are huge numbers and tell us that how rapidly any news can be propagated via this network.

Now, let the graphs take over

Age of pro-ISIS accounts on Twitter

 

Age of ISIS followers accounts on Twitter

Takeaway: The government should work with Twitter and other social networks to track these accounts and block them as early as they can. The failure to identify and block them will quickly enable them to extend their follower base and spread radicalisation swiftly

Distribution of retweets received by pro-ISIS accounts

X-axis : Number of retweets
Y-axis : Number of tweets

Around 40 per cent of all the tweets posted by pro-ISIS accounts were retweeted at least once and around 10 per cent of the tweets got as much as 20 retweets. The retweets were mostly done by the immediate followers, who made the content available to a bigger universe.

Distribution of retweets received by followers accounts

X-axis : Number of retweets
Y-axis : Number of tweets

We analysed 729,536 tweets from the followers accounts, of which around 30 per cent received at least one retweet and around 1,50,000 tweets received more than 20 retweets.

Takeaway: The radicals are using the network effect to its full potential, and the tweets and content shared by ISIS are easily reaching the common population (people not directly attached to radical groups) on Twitter through retweets earned through these 35,000 accounts

Hashtags used by pro-ISIS accounts

Hashtags used by pro-ISIS followers accounts

The most popular hashtags clearly indicate that religion is used as the primary topic, followed by issues prevailing in Syria and in the surrounding geography.

In followers’ tweets, Kashmir was mentioned many times, which suggests that ISIS is reaching places where it doesn’t have a fixed visibility, currently. 

Takeaway: It’s apparent from this data that extremists are using religion-based keywords in their communications. The government and intelligence agencies can track these words to track more such accounts and take necessary actions to block them

Platforms used by pro-ISIS to post tweets

Platforms used by followers to post tweets

Top websites referred by pro-ISIS accounts

(Site name and number of tweet mentions)

TWITTER.COM 154
FLLWRS.COM 80
BIT.LY 71
FB.ME 32
JUSTPASTE.IT 31
YOUTU.BE 31
PANJIMAS.COM 29
SYAMTODAYNEWS.COM 27
YOUTUBE.COM 23
WP.ME 23
AZZAMMEDIA.NET 15
SHOUTUSSALAM.ORG 13
ZAD-MUSLIM.COM 12
AL-MUSTAQBAL.NET 12
PIC.TWITTER.COM 12
MANJANIK.COM 12
UAPP.LY 10
ARCHIVE.ORG 10
IFT.TT 9
M.VOA-ISLAM.COM 8

Top websites referred by followers accounts

(Site name and number of tweet mentions)

TWITTER.COM 21190
INSTAGRAM.COM 14159
FB.ME 13689
BIT.LY 11139
YOUTU.BE 8440
PATH.COM 6053
FLLWRS.COM 4931
GOO.GL 4447
UAPP.LY 4370
YOUTUBE.COM 4161
PIC.TWITTER.COM 3254
DLVR.IT 2547
QURAN.KSU.EDU.SA 2234
CROWDFIREAPP.COM 2139
JUSTPASTE.IT 2065
DU3A.ORG 1748
CHIRPSTORY.COM 1542
OW.LY 1271
UNFOLLOWSPY.COM 1183
FACEBOOK.COM 1023
LN.IS 1006
KNZMUSLIM.COM 979
WP.ME 976
TINYURL.COM 795
BEASISWAINDO.COM 758
ASK.FM 733
IFT.TT 672
SHAR.ES 660
SYAMTODAYNEWS.COM 648
ARCHIVE.ORG 630
DE.TK 628
SWARMAPP.COM 627
TMBLR.CO 565
L.ASK.FM 554
VINE.CO 543
KOM.PS 537
KNZ.SO 504
MANJANIK.COM 457
M.YOUTUBE.COM 455
AJE.IO 394
HIZBUT-TAHRIR.OR.ID 380
TL.GD 379
JUSTUNFOLLOW.COM 370
ROL.CO.ID 356
BBC.IN 353
BUFF.LY 346
AZZAMMEDIA.NET 343
TWITPIC.COM 331
UNFALERT.COM 325

 

Languages used in tweets sent from pro-ISIS

(Language and percentage of number of tweets)

in 1859 ( 64.66 %)
en 571 ( 19.86 %)
und 196 ( 6.82 %)
ar 99 ( 3.44 %)
nl 57 ( 1.98 %)
sl 18 ( 0.63 %)
tl 15 ( 0.52 %)
fi 12 ( 0.42 %)
tr 12 ( 0.42 %)
es 9 ( 0.31 %)
sk 4 ( 0.14 %)
it 3 ( 0.1 %)
fr 3 ( 0.1 %)
hi 3 ( 0.1 %)
bg 2 ( 0.07 %)
ro 2 ( 0.07 %)
is 2 ( 0.07 %)
de 2 ( 0.07 %)
et 2 ( 0.07 %)
ur 1 ( 0.03 %)
bs 1 ( 0.03 %)
zh 1 ( 0.03 %)
lt 1 ( 0.03 %)

Languages used in tweets sent from followers accounts

(Language and percentage of number of tweets)

in 358258 ( 49.31 %)
en 159145 ( 21.9 %)
ar 114303 ( 15.73 %)
tl 7195 ( 0.99 %)
tr 5047 ( 0.69 %)
fr 4575 ( 0.63 %)
es 3873 ( 0.53 %)
sl 2576 ( 0.35 %)
nl 2426 ( 0.33 %)
et 1981 ( 0.27 %)
de 1379 ( 0.19 %)
hi 1325 ( 0.18 %)
ur 1199 ( 0.17 %)
fi 1024 ( 0.14 %)
pt 972 ( 0.13 %)
it 950 ( 0.13 %)
ru 839 ( 0.12 %)
ja 574 ( 0.08 %)
pl 532 ( 0.07 %)
sk 492 ( 0.07 %)
da 465 ( 0.06 %)
ko 413 ( 0.06 %)
no 412 ( 0.06 %)
lt 344 ( 0.05 %)
sv 330 ( 0.05 %)
hu 317 ( 0.04 %)
ro 304 ( 0.04 %)
bn 300 ( 0.04 %)
bs 288 ( 0.04 %)
fa 278 ( 0.04 %)
lv 269 ( 0.04 %)
is 135 ( 0.02 %)
hr 120 ( 0.02 %)
th 119 ( 0.02 %)
vi 117 ( 0.02 %)
am 107 ( 0.01 %)
ckb 83 ( 0.01 %)
ta 76 ( 0.01 %)
iw 60 ( 0.01 %)
ps 59 ( 0.01 %)
zh 56 ( 0.01 %)
uk 42 ( 0.01 %)

Day-wise distribution for pro-ISIS tweets

Day wise tweets distribution of followers

The distribution of number of followers of followers of pro-ISIS accounts

X-axis: number of followers

Y-axis: per cent of pro-ISIS accounts

From this graph, we can easily see that about 30 per cent of the accounts have more than 300 followers, which is a big number when compared to an average twitter user, and 5 per cent of accounts even have 1,000 or more followers.

All these interesting insights have came from just 110 accounts, imagine the possibilities if the government and intelligence agencies could work on a massive scale to track the radical population on social networks.

The article Decoding the ISIS network on Twitter first appeared in author’s bog.

The views expressed here are of the author’s, and e27 may not necessarily subscribe to them.e27invites members from Asia’s tech industry and startup community to share their honest opinions and expert knowledge with our readers. If you are interested in sharing your point of view, please send us an email at sainul[at]e27[dot]co.

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