A new study of terrorist networks could disrupt the way we think about the threat of homegrown terrorism.
In early 2014, Neil Johnson, a physicist at the University of Miami began monitoring the activity of 196 online groups — a total of over 100,000 people — supporting the Islamic terrorist organization ISIS. Along with a team of computer and social scientists, he spent eight months analyzing how these communities organize and behave online, in the hope of understanding terrorist behavior and predicting future attacks.
The results, published on Thursday, purport to debunk many misconceptions surrounding radicalization.
The first one is that there’s such thing as freelance, or “lone wolf,” terrorism. For Johnson, the “lone wolf” theory — the idea that a person will act on his of her own volition, without orders or connections to an organization — is simply a myth.
“At least, that is what the actual online data tells us. Individuals may appear alone at any given time, but there is a very high chance that they were recently in one of these online aggregates. … It helps ‘keep the fire burning’ in them and also exposes them to material which is of operational use for the future,” Johnson told Heat Street via email.
Understanding the online ecology of these groups — how they emerge, how they relate to each other — he says, is the real key to combating terrorism.
“Pro-ISIS support will quickly grow into one large super-community — which could very rapidly spread material across the Internet — if anti-ISIS agencies aren’t active enough in shutting the smaller groups down,” he told the journal Nature in an interview, “Without these smaller pieces, the larger ones cannot develop.”
Dismantling these clusters of followers (made of individuals who’ve probably never met or seen each other before) while they’re still small is far easier than tracking millions of isolated individuals. And because communities tend to proliferate right before bursts of real world attacks, tracking the number of pro-ISIS groups could also be helpful in predicting, and maybe one day preventing, terrorist attacks.
Another popular stereotype the new study undermines is that men are dominant within terrorist organizations. Most accounts of female ISIS fighters, or “Jihad Janes,” describe these as “lured” while men are “recruited.”
We tend to view men as the ones beating the recruiting drum, with their call to jihad and martyrdom. But Johnson’s team actually found that no less than 40% of self-proclaimed ISIS followers were female. Not only that, but they play a central role in Islamic extremist networks.
Although men tend to dominate in numbers, it is ultimately women who strengthen the system by channeling funds and distributing recruitment messages, such as audio and video propaganda. The women often act like nodes and centers of information, brokering information to different groups to create a cohesive narrative online.
For their analysis, Johnson and his team used the Russian social network Vkontakte — the largest in Europe — where Islamist groups tend to be more active than on Facebook, which routinely shuts down their activity (or at least, tries to).
Perhaps it’s time we started taking Jihadi fangirls seriously — instead of pitying their plight.
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