“Social Network Analysis” (SNA) is the application of network theory—a field which joins together sociological and mathematical disciplines—to analyze the structure of online social networks. Its aim is to analyze communities of interest in terms of the nature of social ties within that community. The underlying premise of SNA is that relationships within communities matter in influencing the beliefs, behaviours, and experiences of individuals within that community. In this respect, SNA can be used, for example, to monitor the spread of messages and the sharing of information within communities by modelling who is central, who is authoritative, who is talking to whom, and the nature of interactions between various “nodes” in a community.
SNA is an approach which can be applied to the counterterrorism context to model the relationships and interactions between various entities and/or accounts of interest. The strength of SNA as an analytical approach is that it can strengthen the efforts of intelligence and law enforcement officials map out links between suspected extremist entities and to provide a picture of the structure of a suspected extremist community.
In 2013, The SecDev Group undertook a 10-month Kanishka-funded project that set out, in part, to explore methodologies and technologies for open source social media (OSSM) research and their potential utility for detecting weak signals of radicalization towards violent extremism online.
This 2014 report by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence (ICSR) presents the findings of a 12-month study on the social media profiles of 190 Western and European foreign fighters.
This 2013 article analyzes content generated on Twitter during the attacks at the Boston Marathon in April 2013. The authors perform an in-depth characterization of what factors influenced malicious content and profiles becoming viral.
This paper focuses on social network analysis (SNA) for the purposes of community detection using a hybrid graph-based tag clustering scheme (HGC). The authors present a novel scheme for graph-based clustering with the goal of identifying groups of related tags in folksonomies.
This article deals with the rapidly growing body of research that has accompanied the meteoric rise of Facebook as social scientists assess the impact of Facebook on social life.
This article studied a selection of right-wing extremist (RWE) groups on Twitter. The authors looked at particular language-based networks as case studies, collecting Twitter data for groups across eight countries.
This 2014 article proposes an estimation method for relationship strength in weighted social network graphs. The authors argue that their method can fully estimate the relationship strength between any two users in a social network, whether they are directly connected or not.
This paper focuses on network theory and Social Network Analysis (SNA). It clarifies the concept of a social network and helps identify the characteristic elements of social network theorizing.
This summary captures the main findings of a longitudinal content analysis of a known foreign fighter’s (FF) public social media activity for signs of radicalization toward violent extremism.
This article is an update of the September 2014 conference presentation given at the 2014 Advances in Databases and Information Systems Conference (ADBIS 2014). The article focuses on the detection of communities within Online Social Networks.
This paper examines approaches for analyzing Twitter messages to distinguish between those covering real-world events and non-event messages. To validate this work the authors applied their process to 2.6 million Twitter messages.
This 2012 article focuses on Social Network Analysis (SNA) and particularly the challenge of identifying central nodes within a given social network. The authors propose a new centrality measure for weighted networks based on the amoeboid algorithm, which is called Physarum centrality.
This article is based on a research project conducted by the SecDev Group in collaboration with the U.S. National Institute for Justice (NIJ) in San Diego.
This 2010 post focuses on the distance between nodes within social networks and particularly those with disconnected components. Key node centrality is defined by the author as the inverse of farness, and in turn, the sum of distances to all other nodes within a given network structure.
This paper explores the use of crawling global social networking platforms to undercover previously unknown radicalized individuals. To prove the utility of this process the authors collect a YouTube dataset from a group that potentially has a radicalizing agenda.
This is a slideshow of the June 2011 lecture on the topic of community detection using graphs with a focus on Social Media applications.
The British Psychological Society’s Guidelines for Ethical Practice in Psychological Research Online serves as a complement to existing ethical principles in the realm of Internet Mediated Research (IMR).
This 2013 paper introduces a methodology that incorporates information available on terrorist networks, into the analysis of social networks underlying terrorist groups.
This survey reviews the literature and concepts of the data mining of social networks, with special emphasis on their representation as a graph structure. The article is divided into two principal parts:
This brief report is based on a September 2014 survey and includes statistical data on users of social media and networking platforms, comparing the years 2013 and 2014 for the differences in gender, age, race, education, wage, and demographic location (i.e. rural, suburban, urban).
This 2012 article focuses on the detection of hidden relationship structures in online social networks including the characteristics of relationship structures on Facebook. The authors argue that graphs fail to capture the finer qualities of online social network relationships.
This research note summarizes experimental research conducted by The SecDev Group in 2013, as part of a Public Safety Canada, Kanishka-funded project looking at social media analytics and the prevention of violent extremism.
This experiment used the Twitter profile of a U.K. national, verified to be an active foreign fighter (FF) in the Syrian civil war, as the seed for constructing a network topology based on social media interactions.
This document aims to provide guidance for the use of social media in market, social and opinion research.
This 2011 article provides an insightful look into the presence of gangs on social media and social networking websites.
This resource contains the description and data analysis from a research project conducted by Fifth Tribe into ISIS’s use of Twitter in the aftermath of the 2015 Paris Attacks.
The article examines the activity of the ‘media mujahedeen’ – the supporters of jihadist groups who disseminate propaganda content online.
This article consists of an interview with one of the leading authors in social media research, Jamie Bartlett. The article provides an insightful and informative look at how the broader Internet is used by various groups.
This resource is an informative, visual and descriptive infographic by Fifth Tribe focused in ISIS’s use of Twitter. The infographic and descriptions in the article were written following the Paris attacks in November 2015.
This article attempts to understand how networks of influence are formed among Twitter users, and the relative influence of global news media organizations and information providers in the Twittersphere during such global news events.
This 2013 paper focuses on measuring relationship strength on Facebook based on user’s activities and profile information. The authors critique social network research focused on friendship networks.
This article outlines a semi-automated approach for analyzing the content and structure of online hate groups active on blogging platforms.
This article focuses on Data Mining and Social Network Analysis (SNA) amongst bloggers, and in particular the mining of racist groups and cyber hate communities in online blogging websites.
This 2013 paper focuses on the modelling of terrorist networks online and addresses changes in technology and the associated creation of new security dynamics and threats.
The article aims to build an unsupervised model to estimate relationship strength based on profile similarity and interaction activity.
This seminal 1991 article examines the strategic applications of network analysis methodologies for law enforcement.
This short 2014 article discusses the turn to social media by Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, and particularly their presence on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media sites.
This 2010 article focuses on Social Network Analysis (SNA) and proposes a new generation of node centrality measures for weighted networks. The authors do this by building on previous research, which uses weights to operationalize tie strength between nodes within networks.
This paper focuses on network theory and Social Network Analysis (SNA) and is a foundational piece. It clarifies the concept of a social network and helps identify the characteristic elements of social network theorizing.
This 2014 paper utilizes a form of network representation that incorporates multiple data views to uncover and categorize networks of accounts that fall into four broadly defined groups in the Syrian conflict.
The purpose of this article is to inform the wider, academic debate about strategies and options for countering online radicalization within the U.S. domestic context.
This study employs content and network analysis techniques to explore the predictors of opinion leadership in a political activist network on Twitter. The results demonstrate the feasibility of using user-generated content to measure user characteristics.
The authors of this 2011 article hypothesize that the results of Google Trends, given its daily and weekly reports on queries related to various industries may be correlated to the current level of economic activity in these industries.
This 2014 paper presents a web-crawler called the Terrorism and Extremism Network Extractor (TENE), designed to gather information about extremist activities on the Internet.
This 2012 paper develops a novel methodology for modeling cyber-collective social networks (CSMs) from individual, community, and transnational perspectives. The authors do this by utilizing existing collective action theories and computational approaches for social network analysis.
This 2014 article focuses on Social Network Analysis (SNA) and in particular content propagation and dissemination on Facebook.
This article discusses how the Boston Marathon bombing story unfolded on every possible carrier of information available in the spring of 2013, including Twitter.
This article deals with how social network sites (SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach.
This paper discusses automated methods for detecting online radicalization and radical communities on various platforms, from websites, to forums, to social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and others.
This is a foundational report and a seminal work in the study of social media intelligence and open source research. The paper reviews 245 papers in a semi-systematic literature review of how information and insight can be drawn from open social media sources.
This 2013 paper describes Netvizz, a data collection and extraction application on Facebook that allows researchers to export data in standard file formats from different sections of the social networking platform.
This source criticizes videos, analysis, and commentary circulated throughout Western social media for its reliance on English-only sources on the Syrian Civil War, promoting a biased and often inaccurate perspective on the conflict.
This book by Jamie Bartlett, one of the leading authors in social media research, is based on his work in uncovering the way that radical groups operate in the so-called “dark net”.
This article is a seminal piece and a foundational resource in the field of social media analytics and open source intelligence by some of the field’s leading authors.
This journal article details the shift of al-Qaeda style propaganda operations from closed membership forums to mainstream social networking platforms.
This article assesses the degree to which social media, but primarily Twitter, contributed to hysteric reactions surrounding the lone gunman during the 2014 shootings at Parliament Hill, Ottawa.
This 2013 book aims to inform government decision-makers, security analysts, and activists on how to use the social world to improve security locally, nationally, globally, and cost-effectively.
This short news article in The Daily Telegraph discusses European and North American jihadis’ use of Twitter and social media in Syria.
This 2013 article focuses on identifying and measuring the influence of extremist accounts on Twitter, assessing extremist content, and determining ways to counter violent extremism (CVE) in online social networks.
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