The Deadliness of Terrorist Groups’ Twitter Usage and Popularity

• In Event: Terrorism: Motivations, Strategy, and Messaging

Abstract

Despite successful examples of social media propaganda by terrorist organizations in practice, there is no scholarly research that investigates whether terrorist organizations’ participation and fan base in social media can be translated into real world casualties’ count. This research aims to fill this void by investigating the deadliness of the usage and the number of followers of each Jihadist group related account on Twitter. Specifically, this paper investigates terrorist groups’ participation and popularity on Twitter in terms of real world casualties. To do this, I use a difference-in-difference model to estimate the impact of a terrorist group’s participation in Twitter on the casualty counts inflicted by the group. Second, I use a Heckman two-stage model to estimate the deadliness of popularity on Twitter, which is the number of followers of a particular terrorist group. This research provides quantitative evidence to illustrate the deadliness of the terrorists’ use of social media, which is rare in the terrorism literature.

Author

• Bo Jiang, University of Maryland