Being able to detect the signs that foreshadow terror attacks that could end with a death toll is vital in the battle to prevent these incidents from happening again.
One of the tools that terrorism experts and government agencies are learning to use is sift through social media posts to find clues. Some terror acts have been preceded by posts and online activities promoting the cause of militant groups.
The recent shooting at an Orlando gay nightclub on June 12, for example, is one of those cases; the terrorist, Omar Mateen, turned to Facebook to show his affiliation with the Islamic State beforehand.
In light of the fact that we are witnessing more and more terror acts, a physicist and his team hope to improve the potential of using social media in preventing the next one.
Neil Johnson from the University of Miami has come up with a mathematical model to identify the growth and organizational patterns of the ISIS terrorist group in the online, which may aid governmental agencies in thwarting future attacks.
For the research, the team focused on the social platform VKontake, or VK, and the potential terrorist activities that might take place there. The Russia-based social media website was chosen for the mathematical model because pro-ISIS pages don’t stand a chance on Facebook, which deletes them immediately.
With roughly 350 million users worldwide, VK allows multiple languages, which makes it ideal for ISIS to spread its propaganda among the Russian-speaking population.
The team searched for pro-ISIS posts from mid-2014 to August 2015, scouring through posts in multiple languages that include mentions of activities related to the militant group. Based on what they found, they eventually came up with an equation that unmasked the online habits of Islamic State sympathizers.
According to the paper featured in the journal Science, the groups that are pro-ISIS exhibit predictable behaviors before the attacks. An act of violence is often preceded by a sudden spike in the number of ISIS-supporting aggregates.
Even though they are occasionally deleted by online moderators, pro-ISIS groups manage to survive and sprout in new locations or on new servers. The computer algorithm developed by the University of Miami researchers showed that shutting down small groups can help disable the spread of the ISIS propaganda.
Image Source: Washington Times
