COUNTERING TERRORISM ON SOCIAL MEDIA USING BIG DATA

Terrorism and violence are used by miscreant groups and individuals to disrupt the normal course of events. While not a new phenomenon, the information age offers new and innovative methods for spreading messages related to terrorism and expansion through recruitment on social media. These observations are alarming due to the broad reach and speed of propagation made available by social media. To ensure safety, harmony, and peace, it is important that the use of social media for terrorism is minimised. We discuss the various methods used by terrorists on social media to increase exposure and identify how the inherent structure of social media, the amount of data available, and language understanding pose challenges as well as opportunities for control efforts. We propose a strategy for restraining terrorist activities through data mining methods on big data created by social media in combination with natural language processing for language understanding and social network analysis for uncovering the underlying structure and association of terrorist groups and their activitie