More than 45,000 pro-IS Twitter accounts created in fall 2014: Report

At least 45,000 Twitter accounts supportive of the Islamic State (IS) group were created in the autumn of 2014, according to a new report released on Tuesday by the US-based Brookings Institution.

The report, produced by J.M. Berger, a non-resident fellow at Brookings, stated that the “vast majority” of IS Twitter accounts had less than 500 followers each, and that no account “actively supporting” IS had more than 50,000 followers.

This marked a decrease from earlier in the year when some accounts had more than 80,000 followers.

The report highlighted the difficulty of attempting to suspend IS Twitter accounts, and determining which accounts should take priority in such actions.

“The pace of activity – the number of tweets per day – was perhaps the important factor in determining who would be suspended,” it said.

“Suspended users tweeted three times as often as those who were not suspended, and received almost 10 times as many retweets from other [IS] supporters. Suspended users averaged twice as many followers as those who were not suspended.”

Since the rise to prominence of IS in 2014, the group's social media presence has been a major propaganda tool, allowing a legion of fans and activists from around the world, as well as IS fighters themsleves in Iraq and Syria, to spread their message and activities across Twitter and Facebook.

Arguably the most high profile account set up by a follower of IS was that of Shami Witness, who was arrested in Bangalore, India in December on suspicion of cyber terrorism and crimes against the state. The users' real name was later revealed to be Mehdi Masroor Biswas.

Suspending pro-IS accounts

Charlie Winter, a researcher at counter-extremism thinktank Quilliam Foundation, told Middle East Eye that Twitter was still coming to grips with how to undermine IS accounts.

“Twitter is getting quite good at taking down the Arabic-language accounts, because its the Arabic ones that matter. They're [the] first point of contact from a computer screen to the rest of the world,” he said. “And Twitter is getting quite good at taking them down; it's identified some of the really key players in it.”

Winter pointed out, however, that activists were very quick to respond to suspensions and effective at creating new accounts. He said he could often find a Twitter user whose account has been taken down in a matter of minutes.

“So while I think Twitter suspensions were effective before, people have found a way around them now.”

In the Brookings report, Berger emphasised that “targeting the most active members of the [IS] supporter network undercuts [IS’] most important strategic advantage on platforms like Twitter – the 1,000 to 3,000 accounts that are, at any given time, far more active than ordinary Twitter users.”

Some IS supporters took their Twitter activities a step further in early January, when a group declaring sympathy for IS hacked into the US Central Command's Twitter account and YouTube page, posting internal military documents online.

Hackers with the self-declared "Cybercaliphate" wrote on Centcom's seized Twitter account that the group "is already here, we are in your PCs, in each military base".

Winter told MEE that years of operating under the repressive government of Bashar al-Assad had given Syrian activists the know-how to bypass access restrictions to social media sites with proxy servers or the Tor project.

Pop culture references

Meanwhile, IS activists have also effectively used pop culture references and “memes” as a way of hooking in young and modern Internet users.

A Twitter account appeared in 2014 called @ISILCats or 'Islamic State of Cats' which appeared to show IS fighters in Syria posing in comical positions with cats.

The summary of the account reads "I Can Haz Islamic State Plz" - a reference to the popular Happy Cat meme.