Scientists from Florida have found a link between terrorist attacks and social networks

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Employees of the University of Miami, Florida, created a mathematical model to study the patterns of behavior of radical groups, including terrorist, in social networks.

According to researchers, published an article in the journal Science, This model can be used to predict terrorist attacks by tracking user activity.

The authors of the work created their model by studying groups on the social network Facebook and its analogues, including the Russian VKontakte, that are dedicated to the activities of the so-called “Islamic State.”

Experts paid great attention to the VKontakte study, explaining their choice due to its multilingual interface and the fact that Facebook quickly blocks such groups.

To search for communities, scientists manually created a set of hashtags in different languages, loaded it into a computer program that searched for new hashtags using the snowball method. One hashtag automatically “hooked” others, and a new search was carried out across an expanded database.

In total, the authors managed to find 196 terrorist groups that included more than 108 thousands of users. Scientists followed their activity from January 1 to August 31 2015.

The resulting schedule was rather heterogeneous, with a varying number of subscriptions per user and per group. He did not have a hierarchical structure, which prompted researchers to the idea that there are no leaders in such associations, and communities appear spontaneously.

Researchers also say that it is likely that the members of these groups have never even met in real life. However, they note the “survivability” of such communities - after blocking, some of them received new names and again recruited participants, about 60% of whom remained the same.

One of the main findings of the study is that an active increase in the number of terrorist and other radical groups can be an indicator of the start of preparation of terrorist attacks in reality. In particular, the scientists associated the peak for the period with the battles for Kobani in the north of Syria.

According to experts, the development of large groups can be prevented by closing smaller ones first. Moreover, the scientists emphasized that if the rate of group closure is too low, they will develop into “supergroups.”

Scientists say such work can help identify individual activists like Omar Matin, who arranged last week. mass execution in a gay club in Orlando, but the effectiveness of this method has not yet been proved and must be carefully worked out.

Как сообщил American Senator Ron Johnson, who considered himself a supporter of the Islamic State, Mateen previously wrote a post on a social network in which he called on Russia and the United States to abandon airstrikes against the positions of the extremist group “Islamic State.” At the same time, according to him, Matin wrote on Facebook from at least five accounts.

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