"I Like ISIS, but I Want to Watch Chris Nolan's New Movie": Exploring ISIS Supporters on Twitter

Walid Magdy, Kareem Darwish, Ingmar Weber

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

The recent rise of the "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria" (ISIS) has sparked significant interest in the group. We explored the tweets of a large number of Twitter users who frequently comment on this subject by either showing support or opposition. ISIS supporters dedicate on average 20% of their tweets to ISIS related content, compared to 4.5% for those who oppose ISIS. Thus, the vast majority of tweets for both groups are on general topics, covering many aspects in life, including politics, religion, and even jokes and funny photos. Our demo allows users to search and explore 123 million tweets of 57 thousands Twitter users who have declared explicit positions towards ISIS. Given a query, our system displays a comparative report that shows the difference in views between supporters and opponents of ISIS on the search topic. The report includes a timeline of per day mentions of query terms in the tweets of each group, the top retweeted tweets, images, videos, and tagcloud of top terms in results for each group. Time navigation allows the exploration of content shared by both groups on specific dates, which can go back in time to the period before ISIS appeared.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext 38; Social Media
Place of PublicationNew York, NY, USA
PublisherACM
Pages321-322
Number of pages2
ISBN (Print)978-1-4503-3395-5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Sep 2015

Publication series

NameHT '15
PublisherACM

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