Research Paper: Social Media and Terrorism

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The network landscape has inadvertently undergone significant changes and revolutions in the past decade, especially in the field of social media. The initial idea of the largest social network platform, Facebook, was to help people connect better with others from all over the world. Nowadays, over 2 billion users log onto their Facebook account regularly to share, learn, connect, and donate. This accounts for nearly 30% of the world population (Pro & Con 10).

Social media, according to Merriam-Webster online dictionary, refers to “forms of electronic communication through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content.” While changing the way people live and communicate, it also brings about other problems. A prominent problem is the increasing crimes on social media. Some law-abiding people in real life are susceptible to social media criminals in the cyber world, and victims will be exposed to the risk of not only social relations in the virtual world, but also physical infringement.

Therefore, it is necessary to regulate crime expansion in social media. Social media can both contribute to crime through privacy breach, fraud, and terrorism, and help combat crimes through tracing online connections, facilitating data analysis, and collaborating with law enforcement. This essay will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of social media in relation to online terrorism activities.

The disadvantages of social media include privacy breach, fraud, and terrorism. The first potential disadvantage of social media is privacy breach. On the corporate level, in the initial stage of the social networking, business interests override security principles. In order to maximize commercial interests, companies always encourage new users to join and guide new users to constantly update their personal information, add information, and update their status. However, while the website requires the user to fill in more information, it does not provide enough protection for the user information. “Only those that analyzed the Terms and Conditions were able to understand the truly ominous nature of what rights they were asked to give away (Oso)”. Information leakage in social media will cause different levels of threats to personal and national security, leading to vulnerabilities to various types of crimes. On the personal level, any person with browsing rights can see the information and make corresponding redirection, comments, etc. Once the information is uploaded, it is no longer the user's private information, and no longer personally controlled by the user. Sex offenders use social media websites to target potential victims before committing sexual assaults. 78% of burglars "admitted they use Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Google Street View to select victims' properties (Smith)." According to the founder of Oso, a private social network that rejects selling user data: “We want to give back the users right to privacy and allow the freedom of expression without being sold to the highest bidder (Oso).” Between open and shared social network construction principles, the degree of openness of information is basically unlimited, and lawbreakers can use information to gain profits.

The second potential disadvantage of social media is fraud. With the development of new media technologies and the popularization of smart phones, the development of social media platforms and dating apps has provided convenience for users to contact friends and make new friends. And social networking is fundamentally changing the interaction, communication, organization, formation of opinions. Social networks can eliminate borders, increase transparency, and allow users to do things more smoothly. As a result, more and more people rely on social networking and are willing to post their information online. Because of this, a large number of users' personal information in social networks has become a “business opportunity” for frauds. Social networking sites or social media applications have become a frequent source of fraudulent activities for criminals (Belbey). The social media platforms have become a popular way of fraud, mainly because of its low barriers to entry, ease of daily communication, and its extensive user base. For criminals, publishing false information on social platforms can achieve the effect of viral transmission. Virtual identity on the social media helps con men to hide their true identity, making it easier to commit fraud. The virtual individual is the basic concept of the online world, and it is also the social life instinct to maintain personal security. As a result, imaginary name and background of an online identity, unlike everyday life style, has become a common phenomenon on social networks.

The third potential disadvantage of social media is terrorism. Social media contributes to terrorism due to the companies’ pursuit of profit, information leakage, speed of information transition, and virtual identity. In recent years, with the rise of social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, traditional forums have gradually declined. Any user who receives the information will change his/her role to become a new source of news and spread the information again, so that the information spreads among different social networks. This significantly empowers terrorism influence and speed of expansion in social media. ISIS has responded to this trend quickly. According to Clint Watts, “Al Qaeda in Iraq littered YouTube with violent videos. A few years later, Twitter became a playground for Al Shabaab’s violent tirades in Somalia and the devastating Westgate shopping mall attack in Kenya (Pro & Con 11). It has successfully established its own brand with seditious language and stunning images, successfully recruited thousands globally. “Many policymakers, including some Members of Congress, have expressed concern about the influence the speech of terrorist groups and the speech of others who advocate terrorism can have on those who view or read it” (Congressional Digest 7). The business community, however, has complained that monitoring the Internet's amount of text, pictures, and video information has huge workload and technical difficulties. The increasing interaction between the government and social media is due to the fact that social media companies are aware that they are at a critical position in major international political affairs such as counterterrorism.

Despite the disadvantages discussed above, social media can help battle crime by tracing online connections, facilitating data analysis, and collaborating with law enforcement. Firstly, the online connections in social media are effective tools to trace terrorists and terrorism activities. Fundamentally, social networking sites are a combination of relationship and content. The relationship as one of the hubs is the cornerstone of content dissemination. The dissemination of any content is inseparable from the relationship. With the development of society, criminal means and technologies used are constantly evolving. Within a terrorism or general crime organization, members have a clear division of labor and work together to achieve the purpose of concealing crimes. Therefore, clarifying the gang members and analyzing the status of the internal members of the gang will provide great help to law enforcement. According to Secretary Jeh Johnson: “The Department of Homeland Security is expanding its social media presence in an effort to protect the country, reacting to growing concern about terrorists being radicalized online (Markon).” Social media analysis brings hope for solving the problems of criminal gangs and terrorism groups. There are more or less links within these groups. There are also significant differences between internal relations and external relations. According to the above experience, setting a reasonable optimization goal with the ideas discovered by the community to get a rough group, a fine classification method can be developed, such as a clustering algorithm based on graph kernel functions, to separate and target criminal group connections through social media. For example, in a terror-related network, the leaders' orders must be transmitted to the entire network at the fastest speed, and then the closeness of the center will well identify the important nodes of such information.

Secondly, social media provides the police with large amount of data to analyze, which significantly increases the efficiency of crime detection. Working in tandem is an effective way for law enforcement to improve the efficiency of case handling. It refers to the analysis of multiple potentially relevant cases at the same time. The correlations here include the same group of criminal members or similar crimes (Belbey). Through the analysis of the concatenation of multiple cases, it not only plays a role in complementing information, but also solves many cases of fraud. Social media analysis facilitates concatenation of the same criminal group. In the past, there were no such sources of huge amount of data to be analyzed. The emergence of social media has provided such databases, making crime targeting more efficient than ever. According to Michael Volkov, CEO of The Volkov Law Group: the law enforcement is “learning that social media is a robust source of intelligence and information about suspected criminals and conspiracies (Belbey)”. If multiple cases of the same criminal gang were independently analyzed, the police officers could not effectively perceive the inextricable connections behind them. Combined with social network analysis technology can provide new clues to the case detection. So, using the names of the two people as seeds, an algorithm to find connections can be created in social media. After further analysis of the unknown connection, new traces will be revealed that may be critical to solving multiple cases. Through the way of visual presentation, browsing and managing multiple networks provides quick and effective clues for criminal investigation.

Thirdly, collaboration between social media platforms and law enforcement is effective in battling crime. According to USA Today, “social media sites can, in fact, recover deleted posts or deactivated accounts to archive incriminating evidence (Ericksen)”. As early as 2015, Facebook announced that it had cooperated with the German government in fighting hate speech and xenophobia on social networks. “DIW Berlin subcontracted data collection from social media platforms to Beck et al. Services GmbH, a company specializing in capturing data from such sources (Rieckmann 178)”. It has been generally acknowledged by federal, state, and local law enforcement, that "social media helps solve crimes more quickly (Lexis Nexis)." According to the survey conducted by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, over 80% of the policemen and law enforcement find social media to be effective tools in solving crimes. For example, criminals may leave traces of their activities and locations after committing crimes, lead the police faster to them. Some of the criminals even brag about their criminal activities online, due to the social media culture of sharing and showing off. Meanwhile, social media platforms have also created convenient channels for the public to report crimes directly on social media.

In conclusion, risks and benefits of social media for crime coexist, and the disadvantages can be overcome if relevant authorities take full advantage of social media to combat crime. In the age of the Internet, the frequency of people's interactions in the virtual society is on the rise, and the number of dating sites and their number of users has increased dramatically. Some social networking sites spread ideas of violence, extremism, terrorism, fraud, and even apply the physical crime model to online crimes to create new types. The disadvantages of social media include privacy breach, fraud, and terrorism. This development trend requires vigilance. Meanwhile, social media also helps tracing online connections, facilitating data analysis, and collaborating with the government. Strengthening research on crime prevention on social networking websites is an important part of controlling terrorism in virtual society. Facing the chaos of social media, relevant departments and corporates should carry out comprehensive management from the aspects of fund inspection, operation supervision and responsibility investigation, to provide a safe, civilized and healthy internet platform for the society.

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