Support for Isis stronger in Arabic social media in Europe than in Syria
The leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, delivering a sermon at a mosque in Iraq. Photograph: Uncredited/AP
Support for Islamic State (Isis)
among Arabic-speaking social media users in Belgium, Britain, France
and the US is greater than in the militant group’s heartlands of Syria
and Iraq, a global analysis of over 2m Arabic-language online posts has found.
In what is understood to be the first rigorous mass analysis of those
for and against the world’s largest jihadist organisation, Italian academics found that in a three-and-a-half month period starting in July, content posted by Arabic-speaking
Europeans on Twitter and Facebook was more favourable to Isis than
content posted in those countries on the frontline of the conflict.
In Syria, Isis appears to be dramatically losing the battle for
hearts and minds with more than 92% of tweets, blogs and forum comments
hostile to the militants who have rampaged through the east of the
country and western Iraq, seizing large tracts of territory and
declaring the establishment of a religious state.
The jihadist militants are known for operating a slick propaganda machine
– managing online distribution in order to successfully evade content
controls, piggybacking popular online conversations and galvanising
thousands of global supporters into spreading their message.
Their efforts appear to be having an effect. Outside Syria, support
for Isis, always a minority among online communities, rises
significantly. Forty-seven per cent of studied tweets and posts from
Qatar, 35% from Pakistan, 31% from Belgium and almost 24% of posts from
UK and 21% from the US were classified as being supportive of the
jihadist organisation compared with just under 20% in Jordan, Saudi
Arabia (19.7%) and Iraq (19.8%). Dr Luigi Curini from Voices from the Blogs,
a company set up by academics from Milan University that has been
pioneering new forms of large-scale analysis of online opinions, known
as sentiment analysis, says the research is good evidence for the
proposition that to know Isis up close is to be hostile to them. The team,
including statistician Professor Stefano Iacus, political scientist
Andrea Ceron, and translators, found there was also an intense battle
raging over Islamic State’s religious legitimacy.
Out of the vastly larger proportion of anti-Isis comments in the
posts studied, one out of three (32.8%) criticises Isis for abusing
Islam and using the faith as a cover for pursuing power and other
“private” interests.
One tweet collected by the team on 23 September read: “They are
tyrants and have marred Islam. Everyday Isis makes Islam wear the mask
of a barbarous sexual monster.”
Almost a third (29%) of anti-Isis posts expressed horror or outrage
towards the group’s violent methods and a further 17% aired fears of the
group’s hostility to religious and political freedoms, the study found.
Meanwhile, nearly all of the smaller global community of Isis
supporters – making up just over 20% of the 2m posts – championed the
group for defending or “unifying” the global community of believers or
spreading their faith.
Perhaps counter to western expectations, only 8.3% of pro-Isis posts
were supportive of the group for being an enemy of the west.
Curini said it was good news that Isis was being massively attacked
online over its claim to be Islamic, as it demonstrated just how weak
their theological standing was among online Muslims. “I’d be more
worried if people, when they attack Isis, when they say something
negative about Isis, they talk only about terrorism, or violence … and
they weren’t considering the religious issue.”
The relatively new science of sentiment analysis – the automated
mining of opinion – has been dogged by the difficulties of getting
computers to understand the complexities of natural language.
The subtleties of jokes, sarcasm, slang and general context can prove
difficult for algorithms to categorise and make any non-human
investigation of a collection of opinions prone to high levels of error.
There is also a risk that sentiment is influenced by those who shout
loudest and most frequently in a conversation, but this can be mitigated
by gathering massive volumes of content.
The Italian team say they have introduced a number of innovations to
reduce inaccuracies. Rather than program a computer to understand the
complexities of language itself, they “hand train” an algorithm to
acquaint it with hundreds of positive and negative opinions and the
small clusters of words and mini-phrases they are made up of.
The team then get the algorithm to obtain the likelihood of opinions from the total amalgamation of posts. The team say their peer reviewed methods have a 95%-98% accuracy rate.
Trawling for Isis-related words such as Syria, the caliphate, and the
name of the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the team manage to
collect 2,195,000 public posts on social media, 93% of which came from
Twitter and the rest from public Facebook pages, forums and blogs. Posts
which did not express any clear opinion were ignored.
Form 1 July until 22 October, the study tracked shifts in sentiment
over some of the most dramatic events of Syrian conflict this year,
including Isis’s attack on the Yazidi minority and its swift advance across western Iraq, the publication of videos showing the beheadings of hostages, the bombings of Isis positions by the US and a consortium of other Arab countries, and the siege of the Kurdish town of Kobani.
Violence appears to mobilise people against the perpetrators, the study found. The beheading of British aid worker David Haines
on 13 September and the start of US-led bombardment of Isis positions
in Syria on 23 September were followed by large anti- then pro-Isis
reactions.
Curini said the apparent variance in opinions did not necessarily
show people were changing their views, but more likely demonstrated the
mobilisation of confirmed supporters or opponents following major
events. “The coverage increases, so you go online and you post more
things,” Curini said.
The team also collected and analysed over 90,000 Arabic-language news
articles to compare the social media posts against. They found the news
articles to be hostile to Isis nine times out of 10 and no statistical
correlation between the two, suggesting official and often
state-controlled media were not controlling opinions online. “By
analysing social media we can see there is not always this homogenous
sentiment against Isis,” Curini said.
No comments:
Post a Comment