Social Media Intelligence in Combating Terrorism: Social Network Analysis of the FETO/PDY Terrorist Organization

30.06.2022 | Erol Başaran BURAL

Social media is an internet tool of which the individuals interact with each other online. Those are the platforms where people can share their own content or ideas by using the text, photos, audio, video or a mixture of these, and also can discuss and contribute to a topic under discussion. Social media tools have become preferred not only by the ordinary people but also by criminal organizations. In this context, terrorist organizations, which are adapting themselves to new technologies, have also taken their place among those who use social media. Terrorist organizations use social media tools to; recruit new members, provide financial support, communicate with its members, provide training to its members, increase the organizations’ situational awareness, collect information to plan terrorist acts, radicalize and make propaganda. As terrorist organizations became more active in social media, states also developed new methods of combatting terrorism and started to collect intelligence by monitoring terrorist organizations and their supporters’ social media accounts. In this study, FETÖ/PDY supporter’s Twitter accounts identified by snowball method, the recent posts of these accounts collected; the collected data analyzed by social network and content analysis methods then converted into social media intelligence.

Bural, E.B. (2022). Social Media Intelligence in Combating Terrorism: Social Network Analysis of the FETO/PDY Terrorist Organization. Journal of Intelligence Research and Studies, 1(1), pp.60-83, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.29228/icad.3