ISIS at its apogee: the Arabic discourse on Twitter and what we can learn from that about ISIS support and Foreign Fighters
This study addresses the problem of understanding ISIS support dynamics and foreign fighter recruitment for policymakers and researchers, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The researchers analyzed 26.2 million Arabic tweets from July 2014 to January 2015 to measure support and aversion toward ISIS in online Arab communities, linking opinions to daily events and exploring the relationship between online opinions across countries and the number of foreign fighters joining ISIS.
We analyze 26.2 million comments published in Arabic language on Twitter, from July 2014 to January 2015, when ISIS' 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.