Online Social Networks and Terrorism: Threats and Defenses
Over 1 billion active users of online social networks are evidence of the enormous growth of these technologies. Although the majority of online social network users use such services for ordinary social interactions, a very small number may possibly be m
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Online Social Networks and Terrorism: Threats and Defenses Shah Mahmood
Abstract Over 1 billion active users of online social networks are evidence of the enormous growth of these technologies. Although the majority of online social network users use such services for ordinary social interactions, a very small number may possibly be misusing them for terrorism. In this chapter, we first provide the background, definition, and classification of terrorism. Second, we discuss how some terrorists may be using online social networks to: (1) recruit new members to a terrorist organization and maintain the loyalty of their existing sympathizers; (2) plan attacks and share information about them; (3) gather intelligence; (4) train recruits for specific attacks; (5) raise funds for their causes; (6) propagate fear amongst the enemy population; and (7) engage in counterintelligence to uncover undercover agents. Third, we discuss several mechanisms to detect terrorists using online social networks, including: (1) keyword-based flagging; (2) sentiment analysis; (3) honeypots; (4) social network analysis; (5) facial recognition; and (6) view escalation. We show that the keyword-only flagging mechanism used by US Department of Homeland Security to detect terrorists is potentially effective, but certainly produces a large number of false positives, making it possibly less efficient in practice. Finally, we propose the use of targeted advertisements to rehabilitate possible radicals using the online social networks.
Legal Notice: The content of this chapter are meant only to provide researchers and security personnel with information about threats of the use of online social networks for terrorism and how to counter those threats. It is in no way meant to help anyone do anything unethical or illegal. S. Mahmood () Department of Computer Science, University College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] R. Chbeir and B. Al Bouna (eds.), Security and Privacy Preserving in Social Networks, Lecture Notes in Social Networks, DOI 10.1007/978-3-7091-0894-9 3, © Springer-Verlag Wien 2013
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S. Mahmood
3.1 Introduction The popularity of online social networks has resulted in an unprecedented human connectivity where Facebook alone claims to have over 900 million active users per month. These users have more than 125 billion friend connections and on average upload 300 million photos per day. Every day around 3.2 billion comments and “likes” are also generated by these users [7]. Similarly, over 140 million users are exposing some of their thoughts as 340 million tweets every day on Twitter [29], 280,000 meetings of like minded people are arranged by 9 million users of Meetup [1], 4 billion videos are watched on YouTube on a monthly average [33], 80 million users are flicking through pictures uploaded by 51 million registered users of Flickr [8], around 15 million users have shared their 1.5 billion locations using Foursquare [10], over 90 million users can hang out on GoogleC [4], and almost 175 million users are s
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