The fight against Islamic State jihadists is taking place online as
well on the battlefield, with 18 000 Twitter accounts linked to the
group suspended in recent months, according to a US expert.
ISIS
supporters "are under significant pressure, with the most active and
viral users taking the brunt of the suspensions", JM Berger, a fellow at
the Brookings Institution who tracks militants on social media, told
lawmakers on Tuesday.
Twitter has suspended nearly 800 confirmed
ISIS accounts since the fall of last year but this "may be the tip of
the iceberg", as almost 18 000 accounts "related" to the jihadist
network were suspended over the same time period, according to a
forthcoming survey by Berger and another expert, Jonathon Morgan.
Although
tens of thousands of Twitter accounts remain online, advocates for the
ISIS group online have called the suspensions "devastating", Berger told
the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
The ISIS group had been able to operate on social media with relative ease until recently.
But
- after ISIS released a grisly video in August of the beheading of
American journalist James Foley - Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have
instituted stricter rules to ferret out posts that support "terrorism",
he said.
The suspensions have targeted the most active Twitter
accounts, hampering the ISIS group's propaganda efforts, but has left
intact less active accounts - enabling spy agencies to monitor the
group's backers, according to Berger.
"I believe the current
environment is approaching the right balance of pressure on ISIS
networks, degrading its ability to achieve its goals while still
allowing the United States to exploit open source intelligence from the
network of members and supporters online," he said.
There are at
least 45 000 Twitter accounts used by ISIS supporters, including those
created and suspended in recent months, he said.
The ISIS group
has shown a particular acumen when it comes to exploiting social media,
Berger said, and US commanders leading an international air war against
the jihadists in Iraq and Syria have voiced concern over the effect of
their propaganda.
According to Berger, the most active Twitter
accounts "act in a coordinated way to amplify ISIS's message, tweeting
links to ISIS propaganda and hashtags at an unnaturally fast pace, which
cause them to place higher in search results and results in content
being aggregated by third parties."
The ISIS extremists also use
numerous "bots", computer-directed Twitter accounts, that automatically
send out content to spread their message, he said.
The study Berger cited was commissioned by Google Ideas and is due to be published in March.
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