Terrorism & social mediaWeighing the pros, cons of blocking ISIS’s access to social media

The Islamic State has successfully used social media to spread its ideology, share videos of beheadings, and recruit new followers. U.S. counterterrorism agencies have launched their own social media campaigns to diminish ISIS’s effects on would be jihadists, but some officials have considered whether it would be simpler to cut off ISIS from social media networks altogether. Doing so would no doubt limit ISIS’s reach on Western recruits, but could it create a challenge for officials looking to monitor the group’s activities?

A new report from the Brookings Institution raises the question, exploring the risks which might come with suspending ISIS-backed social media accounts, specifically those on Twitter. The report concludes that a suspension campaign could have unintended consequences. Such a strategy could isolate ISIS supporters online, which could in turn “increase the speed and intensity of radicalization for those who do manage to enter the network.”

“Fundamentally, tampering with social networks is a form of social engineering,” said authors J. M. Berger and Jonathon Morgan.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that Twitter accounts belonging to ISIS supporters have roughly 1,000 followers each, a number considerably higher than an ordinary Twitter user. The social media success of ISIS is, however, due to “a relatively small group of hyperactive users, numbering between 500 and 2,000 accounts, which tweet in concentrated bursts of high volume.”

Between September and December 2014, at least 46,000 Twitter accounts belonged to ISIS supporters, though not all of them were active at the same time. Hundreds of these accounts sent tweets with location data embedded in them. “Unsurprisingly, very few users in the dataset opted to enable coordinates,” the report says, yet “the number who did so was surprisingly high given the operational security implications.”

According to the report, 75 percent of accounts selected Arabic as their primary language. The top three locations of these account holders were Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. None of the location-enabled accounts were U.S.-based.

Around the same time the authors began to collect data for the report in 2014, Twitter began suspending large numbers of ISIS Twitter accounts. Researchers found that many of those users simply created new accounts following suspensions. The suspension rate among ISIS Twitter users was 3.4 percent between late 2014 and early 2015.

Armed with data on ISIS Twitter accounts, Berger and Morgan drew some conclusions on questions surrounding the ethics of suppression of violent speech, whether suspensions destroy valuable sources of intelligence, and how suspensions would impact ISIS and its global supporters.

“To some extent, regulating ISIS presents very few ethical dilemmas, given its extreme violence,” the report says, but warns that “the decision to limit the reach of one organization in this manner creates a precedent, and in future cases the lines will almost certainly less clear and bright.” Suspensions should not involve the entire ISIS social media network, the study argues. “If every single ISIS supporter disappeared from Twitter tomorrow, it would represent a staggering loss of intelligence.” That said, “many thousands of accounts can likely be removed from the ecosystem without having a dramatic negative impact on the potential intelligence yield.”

For counterterrorism officials, the challenge “is to sufficiently degrade the performance of the (social media) network to make a difference without driving the less visible and more valuable ISIS supporters out of the social network in large numbers.”

“The consequences of neglecting to weed a garden are obvious,” the authors conclude, “even though weeds will always return.”

— Read more in J. M. Berger and Jonathon Morgan, The ISIS Twitter census: Defining and describing the population of ISIS supporters on Twitter (Brookings, March 2015)