Should I Stay or Should I Retweet? Pro-ISIS Twitter Communities and Responses to American Decapitation Strategies

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Over 30,000 foreign fighters have joined the terrorist organization The Islamic State (ISIS). While foreign fighters are not a new phenomenon, many of these men and women were radicalized online over social media platforms. While terrorist organizations are increasingly using platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, the academic research on the topic is limited. This thesis seeks to answer the question: how to do Pro-ISIS communities on Twitter respond to the United States’ decapitation strategy. With a data set of 119,000 tweets, I use Machine Learning and a Naïve Bayes Classifier to examine changes in Jihadist sentiment within the Pro-ISIS Twitter community in the two weeks before and after three American decapitation strikes against ISIS leaders. Ultimately, I found that in cases where the target has a significant social media presence the number of Jihadist tweets within the community increases, whereas in the case where the target has no social media presence there is not a statistically significant difference in the number of Jihadist tweets within the community.

Type of resource	text
Date created	May 23, 2017

Author	Margolin, Elizabeth
Primary advisor	Crenshaw, Martha
Advisor	Grimmer, Justin
Degree granting institution	Stanford University, Center for International Security and Cooperation

Subject	Center for International Security and Cooperation
Subject	terrorism
Subject	social media
Subject	decapitation strategy
Genre	Thesis

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/yn937pn1057

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).

Preferred Citation: Margolin, Elizabeth. (2017). Should I Stay or Should I Retweet? Pro-ISIS Twitter Communities and Responses To American Decapitation Strategies. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/yn937pn1057

Stanford University, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies, Theses

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