What is it about?
This article examines the attempts of Islamic State to use Twitter to disseminate its online magazine, Rumiyah. It focuses on a total of 892 distinct outlinks that were collected from a dataset of 11,520 tweets that mentioned Rumiyah. The article analyses these outlinks and discusses Islamic State's targeting of smaller platforms, its use of botnets, and the impact of traditional news media coverage.
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Why is it important?
Online propaganda and radicalisation is widely regarded as a pressing security concern, by national governments and international governmental organisations alike. Policymakers have repeatedly insisted that the major social media platforms need to do more to remove terrorist content from their platforms. This article evaluates Twitter's efforts to prevent its platform from being used to disseminate Islamic State's online magazine, and identifies some remaining challenges.
Perspectives
One of the original contributions of this article is that it looked behind the outlinks to see what types of content they led to. This enabled us to test how many of the outlinks led to a full copy of Rumiyah magazine, and what proportion of these URLs were still active.
Stuart Macdonald
Swansea University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Daesh, Twitter and the Social Media Ecosystem, The RUSI Journal, June 2019, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/03071847.2019.1644775.
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