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Author Biography

William M. Marcellino is a behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation, with interests in text and social media analytics as applied to national security issues.

DOI

http://doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.10.1.1527

Subject Area Keywords

Counterterrorism, Methodology, National security, Nonstate actors, Radicalization, Social media, Terrorism / counterterrorism

Abstract

We describe an innovative approach to social media analysis, combining corpus linguists and statistical methods to measure the resonance of Daesh's propaganda to a sample population (Eqypt). The findings from this research effort demonstrate that: (1) Daesh's messaging is measurable and distinct from other Salafi groups, such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood; (2) while Daesh’s messaging generally do not resonate with Egyptians, its uptake increased in Upper Egypt and the Sinai regions during 2014; and (3) this method can be applied more broadly to measure the spread of violent extremist messaging across regional populations over time.

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