ISIS and Social Media Report Examined At SXSW
By Melony Roy
AUSTIN, Texas (CBS) --- The authors of a new report that defines and describes the ISIS population on Twitter presented it at the South by Southwest interactive conference in Austin.
Authors Jonathan Morgan and Jim Berger analyzed a sample of 20,000 ISIS supporting Twitter accounts and found that even though ISIS has only been active under that name for less than 2 years, it has an extremely active and connected group on Twitter.
Morgan says, "They see this as part of their mission of the extremist voice that they have, and they are willing to commit to it in a big way."
The group's social media success is attributed to small groups of hyperactive users.
"In terms of the number of people involved, it's not a particularly large network as they go," he says. "45,000 – 46,000 is a drop in the bucket compared to the size of Twitter. The difference is that these people are hyper connected to one another."
Almost one-in-five ISIS supporters selected English as their primary language on Twitter.
"They use a lot of tricks, bots, and apps," Morgan says. "What they want is that when they are away from their accounts, they want the app to keep tweeting, so they sign up for these apps which will often tweet out prayer requests, inspirational quotes, or religious references just to fill up the timeline while they are not at their computers."
The authors suggest social media companies and the government work together to create a strategy to deal with extremism on their networks.
