Citation

Ceron A, Curini L, Iacus SM. Sage open 2019; 9(1): e2158244018789229.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/2158244018789229

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

We analyze 26.2 million comments published in Arabic language on Twitter, from July 2014 to January 2015, when Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)'s strength reached its peak and the group was prominently expanding the territorial area under its control. By doing that, we are able to measure the share of support and aversion toward the Islamic State within the online Arab communities. We then investigate two specific topics. First, by exploiting the time granularity of the tweets, we link the opinions with daily events to understand the main determinants of the changing trend in support toward ISIS. Second, by taking advantage of the geographical locations of tweets, we explore the relationship between online opinions across countries and the number of foreign fighters joining ISIS.

Language: en