ISIS sends out “90,000 social (media) messages a day.”
— Hillary Mann Leverett on Tuesday, February 17th, 2015 in an interview on CNN
The Islamic State group, or ISIS, has fused two things that until now were separated by centuries — medieval brutality and the hyperactive use of social media.
Former National Security Council staffer Hillary Mann Leverett focused on the ISIS recruiting machine during a Feb. 17, 2015, interview on CNN’s New Day.
“There are 90,000 social messages a day. All they have to do is put real footage of what the United States has done in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya,” Leverett said.
The huge use of social media by ISIS is not in question. We were curious though about the source of the 90,000 figure. That seems like a lot of tweets and Facebook posts for a single organization to crank out.
Leverett pointed to us a New York Times article about the expansion of the State Department’s Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications to thwart the Islamic State message machine.
“With the Islamic State and its supporters producing as many as 90,000 tweets and other social media responses every day, American officials acknowledge they have a tough job ahead to blunt the group’s digital momentum,” the reporters wrote.
That doesn’t exactly say where the number originated. The earliest use we could find was in a report from the British House of Commons Defence Committee on Feb. 5, 2015. In a section focused on the threat of ISIS in Iraq, the report said, “They have proved themselves adept in the use of social media, sending 90,000 messages a day.”
Independently, we discovered two separate research groups that track the social media activity of the Islamic State.
J.M. Berger is a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution who recently testified before the Foreign Affairs Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives about terrorists’ use of social media. Berger and his technologist colleague Jonathon Morgan set up a system to capture the scope of pro-ISIS messaging.
They found that in the fall of 2014, there were at least 45,000 Twitter accounts used by ISIS supporters. Berger told PunditFact that 90,000 messages a day is likely a conservative number.
“My best estimate is something over 200,000 a day, including retweets, but that comes with a lot of caveats,” Berger said.
Berger said the figure includes supporters as well as actual members of ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
Voices from the Blogs, a research service based in Milan, Italy, tracks tweets written in Arabic. This is a subset of the total number of tweets related to the Islamic State, since tweets are sent in many different languages. One of the lead researchers is Luigi Curini, an associate professor of political science at the University of Milan.
Curini told PunditFact that while he and his colleagues saw between 100,000 and 150,000 Arabic language tweets each day from October to January, many were judged to take no clear stance on ISIS and of the remainder, only about 20 to 25 percent favored the extremist group. After taking those factors into account, the high-end estimate of pro-ISIS Arabic language tweets averaged about 38,000 per day.
Daily events will shape the Twitter traffic. Curini was struck by the impact of the murders of the Charlie Hebdo journalists.
“The sentiment pro-ISIS actually decreased soon after the Paris attack, especially in the European community writing in Arabic language,” Curini said. “But this drop lasted just a few days.”
Still, right after the violence in Paris, two media groups with ties to ISIS, Al-Battar and Al-Ghuraba, launched a campaign to inspire copycat killings. According to the Middle East Media Research Institute, a private media surveillance firm, they fired off tweets and circulated images like these for others to share.
Berger’s analysis included all languages and, like Curini’s work, tallied only the pro-ISIS messages. The efforts of both groups show a high volume of tweeting, although some significant fraction of that comes from fans of ISIS, rather than the group itself.
Nevertheless, regardless of the source, whether insider, fan, or computer-generated, Berger said these messages reach a shared audience for whom the source might be irrelevant. This makes targeting a counter message very difficult.
Our ruling
Leverett said the Islamic State group sends out 90,000 social media messages each day. While the exact source of that figure is a bit unclear, one independent researcher has data that point to much a higher number. There could be as many as 200,000 pro-ISIS tweets a day. That includes re-tweets and some generated by computer programs. A lower figure from an Italian-based group looked only at Arabic language tweets.
However, while it is difficult to know for sure, a large share of these messages come from outside the ISIS organization itself.
We rate the claim Mostly True.
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