Monitoring Russian social media service reveals clues for combating terrorism

MIT Technology Review : Social media is widely used by terrorists and other groups to organize themselves. Neil Johnson of the University of Miami in Florida and his colleagues have developed an algorithm they say could help minimize the ability of such groups to organize. They developed the algorithm by studying a Russia-based social platform called VKontakte, which has 360 million users from around the world. They identified nearly 200 groups that shared content suggestive of a concrete connection to the terrorist group ISIS. Calling these groups “aggregates,” Johnson’s team watched them grow and coalesce over a six-month period and developed a behavior model based on the aggregates’ day-to-day behavior. The model reveals some general and social media behaviors that the researchers believe could be used to prevent the organization of terrorist groups online. They say such efforts should focus on identifying aggregates, which are less numerous and easier to identify than individuals, and should specifically target smaller aggregates before they merge into larger ones. The model also revealed that the rate of aggregate formation increased in the periods leading up to major events, such as the ISIS attacks in Kobane, Syria.