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During the Study Period, ISIS Opponents Generally Outnumber Supporters Six to One

• ISIS supporters, however, routinely outtweet opponents, producing 50 percent more tweets per day.

Lexical Analysis Reveals Four Metacommunities in the Twitter ISIS Conversation: Shia, Sunni, Syrian Mujahideen, and ISIS Supporters

• The Shia group condemns ISIS and expresses a positive attitude toward the international coalition and Christians.
• Syrian Mujahideen (anti-Assad movement) supporters have mixed attitudes toward ISIS and generally negative attitudes toward the international coalition.
• ISIS supporters highlight positive themes of religion and belonging; insult Shia, the Syrian regime, and the international community; and pursue sophisticated social media strategies to spread their message.
• The Sunni group is highly fractured along national lines, so different themes resonate differently within this community.

Patterns of Connection Among the Metacommunities Suggest Inroads for Influence

• The core of the Syrian Mujahideen metacommunity serves as an important connection between the Shia metacommunity, some Sunni communities, and the ISIS Supporters metacommunity, who are otherwise disconnected.
• The Egyptian, Saudi Arabian, and Gulf Cooperation Council communities form the core of the Sunni metacommunity, by far more fractured than the Shia, Syrian Mujahideen, and ISIS Supporter metacommunities.
• Within the Sunni subcommunities, the Yemeni community has the highest percentage of ISIS supporters and is sharply divided between ISIS supporters and opponents.

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), like no other terrorist organization before, has used Twitter and other social media channels to broadcast its message, inspire followers, and recruit new fighters. Though much less heralded, ISIS opponents have also taken to Twitter to castigate the ISIS message. This report draws on publicly available Twitter data to examine this ongoing debate about ISIS on Arabic Twitter and to better understand the networks of ISIS supporters and opponents on Twitter. To support the countermessaging effort and to more deeply understand ISIS supporters and opponents, this study uses a mixed-methods analytic approach to identify and characterize in detail both ISIS support and opposition networks on Twitter. This analytic approach draws on community detection algorithms that help detect interactive communities of Twitter users, lexical analysis that can identify key themes and content for large data sets, and social network analysis.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  ISIS Supporters and Opponents on Twitter

• Chapter Three

  ISIS Debate: Community Content

• Chapter Four

  ISIS Debate: Community Structure

• Chapter Five

  Recommendations and Implications

• Appendix A

  Twitter Search

• Appendix B

  Analytic Methods

• Appendix C

  Sunni Community Analysis