Spreading Propaganda in the Cyberspace: Comparing Uses of Cyber Resources of Al Qaeda and ISIS

• In Event: Impact of Cybercrime on Social Media and Criminal Justice Response: Cyber-terrorism, Cyberbullying, Augmented Reality Game, and Cyber Policing

Abstract

Terrorists in cyberspace increasingly equip themselves with social media in order to promote their ideologies, recruit new members, and justify and prove terrorist attacks and actions. Being one of the earlier empirical studies of cyber activity by terrorist groups by using a multiple-year dataset, this paper explores the ways in which types of social media, contents of messages, and motives for spreading propaganda shape cyberspace. In order to empirically test the relations, we create a dataset with annual Terrorism Reports from 2011 to 2016 as the baseline for a dataset. Based on such data, in our global cyberterrorism dataset, we use and connect the cyber resources (YouTube videos, Twitter mentions, Facebook, online forum, websites, and blogs) and legal documents to individual cases that were mentioned in the reports. The results show that YouTube Videos were primarily used for propagating certain ideologies and for recruiting members for Al Qaeda and ISIS. Al Qaeda-affiliated cyberterrorists used YouTube videos as both individual sources and embedded sources for Facebook and Twitter, whereas ISIS-affiliated cyberterrorists predominantly used YouTube videos and Twitter posts.

Authors

• Kyung-shick Choi, Boston University

• Claire Seungeun Lee, Inha University, South Korea

• Robert Cadigan, Boston University