In the dark world of pro-ISIS social media, nothing is constant. Online groups are always splitting, morphing, and recombining as they're moderated and taken down by international law enforcement and the companies that run the networks they use. But a team of scientists now thinks that even just tracking the rapid churn of pro-ISIS online groups could actually help governments predict violent assaults in the real world.

A Florida-based team of computer scientists, led by Stefan Wuchty at the University of Miami, have developed a mathematical model that follows the online movement and proliferation of members on social media, specifically a Russian Facebook knockoff, called Vkontakte. His team found that as pro-ISIS pages and groups start to split, combine, and regroup at an exponential rate, they can forebode a major real-world crisis. For example, Wuchty explains, a huge spike in Vkontakte activity happened just before the 2014 "unexpected assault by ISIS on Kobane," a city in northern Syria, he says. The computer model is unveiled today in the journal Science.

"In contrast to Facebook and Twitter, where basically all pro-ISIS activity is suppressed immediately, on Vkontakte this kind of activity can proliferate because the online moderators just slowly shut down these groups, and only from time to time. When that happens, you have these drifting, aggregate collections of former followers which can either merge into other groups, fragment into smaller groups, or morph all together. It's truly a complex online ecology," Wuchty says.

"The speed with which new groups emerge actually harbors a signal."

"One of the interesting aspects of this is that we found that the speed with which new groups emerge actually harbors a signal. And that signal allows us to predict the onset of activity in the real world," he says. This signal—the increasingly rapid, staccato pace in the formation and regrouping of online social media followers—basically acts like "taking the pulse" of the group's social momentum, says Wuchty.

Wuchty's team followed 196 pro-ISIS aggregates—shifting informal groups of ISIS sympathizers— on Vkontakte between August of 2014 and January of 2015. A rapid uptick in the shuffling of these Vkontakte groups often came before a violent group event in the regions where ISIS claimed control.

To be clear, while Wuchty does not believe that tracking these online groups might foretell lone wolf ISIS-inspired attacks, like the one seen last weekend in Orlando. "That's the disclaimer," he says. "We're talking about big movements of groups," like those fighting in and supporting the city-wide assault in Kobane, "which goes beyond individuals. We're basically talking about sociology, which is inherently difficult to quantify on the scale of individual people," he says.

Moving forward, Wuchty says he would like to see if this new computer model could be incorporated into real-time forecasting software. Although he admits that like last decade's American color-coded terror alters, a general globe-wide warning system would likely have limited effectiveness. Knowing that something violent, somewhere on the globe might happen tomorrow isn't exactly the most actionable information. But it's something.

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