ISIS extremist militants stormed the national Bardo museum in the capital Tunis last month, which killed twenty-one people, most of whom were also tourists, and injured more than thirty others in the North African country’s worst militant assault in more than a decade.

Since its 2011 uprising against the dictator regime of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia has seen the rise of ultra-extremist ideologies, including local militant groups Ansar al-Sharia and Okba Ibn Nafaa, have turned to violence and targeted Tunisia’s vital tourism industry.

Le Monde Est Bardo twitter.com/BardoMusee

ISIS is Intentionally going viral and it’s branding itself over Social Media

The internet amplified the ISIS campaign of spreading terrorism and dark ideologies and has consequently stifled attempts to diminish the spread of the extremist group’s ideologies mainly through Facebook , Twitter and Youtube.

Twitter has been fighting back these campaigners by suspending thousands of ISIS recruiters and preachers accounts on its platform .In reaction ISIS have supporters have threatened Twitter employees, including co-founder Jack Dorsey specifically, with death over the social network’s practice of blocking accounts associated with the groups.

Data Mining To Predict Terrorist Attacks

Data mining is the process of posing queries and extracting useful patterns or trends often previously unknown from large amounts of data using various techniques such as those from pattern recognition and machine learning. Latelely there has been a big interest on leveraging the use of data mining for counter-terrorism applications

Using the data on more than 50.000+ ISIS connected twitter accounts , I was able to establish an understanding of some factors determined how often ISIS attacks occur , what different types of terror strikes are used in which geopolitical situations, and many other criteria through graphs about the frequency of hashtags usages and the frequency of a particular group of the words used in the tweets.

A simple data mining project of some of the repetitive hashtags and sequences of words used typically by ISIS militants in their tweets yielded surprising results. The results show a rise of some keywords on the tweets that started from Marsh 15, three days before Bardo museum attacks.