ISIS have up to 90,000 Twitter accounts

ISIS have up to 90,000 Twitter accounts

Islamic State could hold up to 90,000 thousand Twitter accounts, despite Twitter purge in 2014 that planned to eradicate the terror group's online presence.

Daily News Service
Daily Mail

The cyber-caliphate of the notorious Islamic State militants is thriving according to a new report released called The Isis Twitter Census which reveals that there could up to 90,000 pro-ISIS Twitter accounts preaching the brutal ideologies of the terror group.

However, the report, co-authored by the Brookings Institution, concludes a conservative estimate of around 46,000 accounts.

The report speculates that the majority of the owners of the accounts are based within the Islamic territories of Iraq and Syria.

The number could also include duplicate accounts, a method used by Jihadists to create a back-up account in the event that their main account is removed.

Three-quarters of the accounts advocating their devotion to their extremist Islamic views post tweets in Arabic and about one-in-five in English. The accounts have an average following of around 1,000.

The number of pro-ISIS Twitter accounts is still rising at an exponential rate, in spite of the comprehensive deletion of many of the extremist group’s accounts in the last few months of 2014.

Islamic State are infamous for their use of social media to exhort their controversial ideologies – examples being of the multiple videos released online perpetrating the barbaric murders of western hostages by an executioner commonly referred to as ‘Jihadi John’.

JM Berger of Brookings, one of the main author’s of the report, said: “Jihadists will exploit any kind of technology that will work to their advantage, but IS is much more successful than other groups.”

The report puts the number of accounts at 46,000 but the research still believes that the potential number could be significantly higher.

“Even that lower figure would put their reach into the millions,” said Aaron Zelin, an expert on jihadist groups.

“Draw people in”

It is believed that the main purpose of the thousands of Twitter accounts deployed by Islamic State militants is to support the initial attraction of people to their ideas and concepts as a group. The terror group then exploit other, more private, applications as a form of recruitment.

“Recruitment is not overt on Twitter. Most of that happens on applications like Kik, WhatsApp and Skype, which are peer-to-peer. What they are doing publicly on Twitter is to draw people in”, said Mr. Zelin.

Zelin continues: “Twitter is sometimes be used as an initial means of contact between a radicalised person and someone who could recruit them, but the conversation would very quickly migrate to direct messages or other platforms.”

The rising threat of Islamic State is summed up by their growing presence online, and with the key demographic of Twitter being that of young teenagers, it is accepted that Islamic State could do some serious damage.

“This is a social media-fuelled terrorism group in a way we haven’t seen yet,” Mr. Zelin told senators in Washington.

“People who are very distant from any battlefield, from any experience of radicalism, are suddenly becoming enticed through social media.”

Police stated recently that at least sixty British women and girls as young as fifteen have been recruited by ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

LEAVE A COMMENT

Leave a Reply