The United States was the fourth most popular location claimed by ISIS Twitter supporters, and the United Kingdom was the tenth, according to a study by the Brookings Institution released Friday.
English was the second most popular language among ISIS supporters (18 percent) with French third at 6 percent. 73 percent of the Twitter accounts chose Arabic as their primary language.
By an overwhelming majority, Saudi Arabia was the most popular country for users to claim. In second and third places were Syria and Iraq, the geographic home of the Islamic State.
The study’s goal was to “create a demographic snapshot of ISIS supporters on Twitter,” and learn if the account suspensions Twitter instituted (most began in September) had a positive or negative impact.
Researchers estimated that the maximum number of ISIS supporting Twitter accounts was 90,000. They then focused on the most pro-Islamic State of those accounts (around 46,000) to collect information from a subset of 20,000.
Very few ISIS supports on Twitter allowed geo-locating (that tracks the geographic location of their phone when Tweets are sent.) Of those that did, most were in the Middle East (many actually in the Islamic State) and none were in the United States.
Brookings also used time zone and location information from user profiles. Researchers also used a third-party algorithm to try to resolve the (user-provided) location information to a country. Those tracking to the U.S. were “extremely noisy” as users rarely identified a particular city (although some chose New York City and Washington, D.C.)
“We are reasonably certain some ISIS supporters deceptively listed locations in the United States in order to create the appearance of a homeland threat,” says the study.
Researchers looked at time-zones selected by users to help narrow down their actual locations.
The most frequently listed were Baghdad, 31 percent; Kyiv, 12 percent; Athens, 10 percent; and Riyadh, 5 percent. As previously noted, a notable number of users listed Arizona and Hawaii as their time zone; combined, these accounted for 6.3 percent.
Researchers also believe that some users chose Baghdad as their time zone or Iraq, Syria or the Islamic State as their location as a show of support.
Twitter is the most popular means the Islamic State uses to disseminate propaganda materials, and intelligence professionals have used it to pin down the authentic of ISIS beheading videos.
Nevertheless, the profundity and availability of ISIS atrocities on the network forced Twitter to begin suspending accounts. “A minimum of 1,000 ISIS-supporting accounts were suspended between September and December 2014, and we saw evidence of potentially thousands more,” said Brookings.
ISIS supporters and sympathizers are undeterred by Twitter’s move – instead they simply create new accounts every few days, and use bots to help delete tweets afterwards.
Many accounts tweet in several languages, or use one language (like Arabic) exclusively but use English-language hash tags.
Images Source: Brookings.edu