Countering Terrorism Incitement of Twitter Profiles in Arabic-Context

Abstract

The use of social media tools by individuals and organizations has substantially increased in recent years. The emergence of smartphones and gadgets in particular is boosting their prevalence. Social media leaves space for nearly every Internet user/entity to contribute. On one hand, social media represents an opportunity to reach out to a large audience for many benign applications, such as advertisements, e-commerce, establishing friendships, and knowledge sharing. On the other, social media is an outlet for many miscreants and criminals to spread their messages and commit crimes. Well-known examples of such abuses include the promotion of terrorism and the recruitment of youth into terrorist groups using Twitter and the like. This paper studies the Twitter profiles of extremists and proposes a technique for automatically detecting these profiles. Achieving a high detection accuracy would help raise awareness about potential terrorist profiles, allowing law enforcement agencies to take legal measures against these accounts (such as blocking them or asking Twitter to close them). The focus of this paper is on Arabic-based profiles, as Arabic is the main language used for communication in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.