Trends in Terrorist Attacks and Radical Social Media Elena Ramlow - Data Visualization Project

With the advent of the information age and revolutionary use of social media platforms, counterterrorism research and preventative measures must shift towards the online arena. The use of social media platforms to advance terrorist ideas and networks is well documented. This research compares the volume and content of social media activity referencing one terrorist organization over others also designated at a given time prior to a terrorist attack. Predictive analyses as well as natural language processing are combined with a temporal analysis of terrorist events. A general view of trends and fluctuations in online activity can provide insights as to how officials can prioritize threat levels and potentially predict which groups are most likely to commit attacks.

This project looks at the general trends of terrorist attacks over time, as well as the relationship between social media and those attacks. At any given time, a myriad of potential threats and communications regarding multiple groups and organizations and locations are posted online. With the recent expansion of data available from large communcation platforms, such as Reddit and 4Chan, social media data can be combined with the Global Terrorism Database from the National Consortium for the Study and Responses to Terrorism and government documents to examine the relationship between terrorist attacks and social media, the hypothesis being that social media activity surrounding a given group would increase prior to attack and that groups would exhibit trends in social media usage similar to trends of other groups prior to attack. The potential outcome of being able to discern these relationships and trends would be risk management, in determining where resources should be diverted, and in predicting which organizations are most likely to initiate a physical attack.