Analysis of Suspended Terrorism-Related Content on Social Media

Social media are widely used by terrorist organizations and extremist groups for disseminating propaganda and recruiting new members. Given the recent pledges both by the major social media platforms and governments towards combating online terrorism, our work aims at understanding the terrorism-related content posted on social media and distinguishing accounts of relevance to terrorism investigations from innocuous ones. We conducted an analysis of textual, spatial, temporal and social network features on data and metadata gathered from suspended Twitter content, and compared them with non-suspended content. Our analysis reveals a number of distinct characteristics of terrorism-related Twitter accounts. This work is a first step towards automated tools for the early detection of terrorism-related and extremist content on Twitter.