In today’s world, wars are fought just as much with posts and tweets as they are with bombs and guns, and ISIS has an army of at least 46,000 Twitter accounts helping it fight these online battles. The study which arrived at this number suggested that there could be as many as 70,000 active ISIS supports on Twitter but that the number is closer to the lower end of the spectrum.
The Islamic State, the violent extremist group that espouses a return to a seventh-century caliphate, has been astonishingly successful at spreading its message using 21st-century social media, according to a study released Thursday. Despite repeated attempts by Twitter to thwart the Islamic State’s threats, propaganda and recruiting by suspending accounts linked to the group, sympathizers have maintained thousands of active accounts on the social network, the study said. The users include a disciplined core group that sends messages frequently and understands how to maximize its impact. “Jihadists will exploit any kind of technology that will work to their advantage,” said J. M. Berger, an expert on online extremism who was the lead author of the study, which was published by the Brookings Institution and financed by Google Ideas. But the Islamic State, he said, “is much more successful than other groups.”
