Understanding engagement with insurgents through retweet rhetoric

Understanding Engagement with Insurgents through Retweet Rhetoric Joel Nothman1 Atif Ahmad1 Christoph Breidbach1 David Malet2 Timothy Baldwin1 1 Department of Computing and Information Systems 2 School of Social and Political Sciences The University of Melbourne {jnothman,atif,christoph.breidbach,david.malet,tbaldwin} @unimelb.edu.au Abstract Organisations — including insurgent movements — harness social media to engage potential consumers. They evoke sympathetic (and antipathic) response; content sharing engenders affinity and community. We report on a pilot study of presumed rhetorical intent for statuses retweeted by a set of suspected Islamic State-sympathetic Twitter accounts. This annotation is orthogonal to prior opinion mining work focused on sentiment or stance expressed in a debate, and suggests a parallel to dialogue act classification applied to retweeting. By exploring the distribution of rhetoric among Islamic State-sympathetic and general users, we also hope to identify trends in IS social media use and user roles. 1 Introduction Social media has become an important plat- form for organisations and communities seeking to engage with adherents and the wider public. Through it we may follow individuals as their ideas and affiliations change, expressed through conversation, broadcast, and rebroadcast. Social scientists are keen to understand how individu- als are transformed in this process of engagement: how this is effected by the organisation, and how it is realised in individual behaviour. Recent media and scholarly studies have high- lighted the use of social media by insurgent organ- isations. Understanding and tracking these activi- ties is of particular interest to law enforcement and policy makers, as well as political scientists study- ing the nature of conflict, in terms of both moni- toring and comprehending insurgent activities. This work presents a new annotation model of partisan retweets (RTs), as “rhetorical acts”. It pi- lots a study of content rebroadcast by suspected IS-sympathetic Twitter users. We develop an an- notation schema to capture the attitude of a par- tisan user when retweeting content, and are able to analyse trends with respect to popularity, and transmission into/out of the IS network. For our pilot set of suspected IS-sympathetic ac- counts, we find that 58% of RTs are evocative; these divide almost equally between expressing pride in the movement, expressing indignation at oppression, and transmitting religious and partisan mythology. Most others (22%) share general con- tent, while 3% manage the ISIS Twitter network under suspension. 2 Background Insurgent movements exploit the decentralised and colloquial nature of social media to counter main- stream narratives (Thompson, 2011; Bernatis, 2014). Berger and Morgan’s (2015) seminal study of IS Twitter accounts describes their network structure and measures status sharing from within or outside the network, but gives little attention to content. Klausen (2015) analyses 10 statuses for each of 59 IS accounts, finding 40% of them deal with religious instruction, and a further 40% report from battle. Our focus on RT intent highlights the dissemination of rhetoric and its affect, classified at finer granularity than this prior work. We investigate the construction of partisan rhetoric through distributed social media activity, while opinion mining of partisan text has largely …

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