A predictive AI-model developed to detect extremist users and ISIS-related content on X – Firstpost

Researchers have developed a predictive model using tweets from 2009 to 2021 that can detect extremist users and content related to the militant group ‘Islamic State’. “The Islamic State group and its affiliates, sympathisers and followers continue to manipulate online communities to spread extremist propaganda,” said Younes Karimi, a graduate student at the university pursuing a doctorate in informatics and the first author of the paper published in the journal Social Media Analysis and Mining. The researchers then analysed the tweets to identify what they referred to as “candidate propaganda.” They compared topics used by known Islamic State group accounts prior to 2015 in the old dataset to the content posted after 2015 by potential affiliates and supporters in their recent dataset. The team found that firstly, the identified content was “pervasive and continuous in the way it’s shared.” Secondly, the team examined ideology-based words and images, which they said are “often designed to elicit an emotional response and influence a large audience.” Thirdly, studying content involving hashtags, Karimi said, “Supporters and affiliates of the Islamic State group recruited people to retweet hashtags to create trending ideas, such as strong religious references, and curate group messaging to improve the group’s branding and ensure message longevity.” The team found that the most used hashtags from ISIS included “The Islamic State”, “Caliphate News”, “Urgent”, “The State of the Caliphate” and “ISIS”.