Measuring the Radicalisation Risk in Social Networks

Abstract

Social networks (SNs) have become a powerful tool for the jihadism as they serve as recruitment assets, live forums, psychological warfare, as well as sharing platforms. SNs enable vulnerable individuals to reach radicalized people, hence triggering their own radicalization process. There are many vulnerability factors linked to socio-economic and demographic conditions that make jihadist militants suitable targets for their radicalization. We focus on these vulnerability factors, studying, understanding, and identifying them on the Internet. Here, we present a set of radicalization indicators and a model to assess them using a data set of tweets published by several Islamic State of Iraq and Sham sympathizers. Results show that there is a strong correlation between the values assigned by the model to the indicators.

Keywords

• Terrorism
• radicalisation
• indicator
• metric
• risk factor
• social network analysis