How ISIS’ language changed over time: more concern with females and more “net-speak”

We (myself and Ana-Maria Bliuc) just published a brief research-paper in the Italian magazine “Security, Terrorism and Society“. We used the computerized text analysis program LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) to investigate the evolution of the language across the first 11 Issues of Dabiq.

Our paper shows ISIS’ increasing concern with females. This is especially important because it shows that ISIS needs to attract not only fighters but also women in order to create a society that is not only composed by warriors but also by families, where people can live an “ordinary” life.  This is a cornerstone of ISIS “utopia”, which is a powerful radicalization motive. The next figure shows the increased concern with females in ISIS language.

Additionally, our analysis shows that ISIS increased its use of internet jargon (for example abbreviations like “btw”, “lol”, thx”). We believe that this suggests that ISIS complies with the requirements of the internet environment, and aims to connect with the identities of young individuals. The next figure shows the increase in “net-speak” in ISIS language.

We believe that the analysis of ISIS language with LIWC categories is particularly interesting because it offers insights about the motives, emotions and concerns of the terrorist group. Research in the field of psychology of political leadership showed that the success of a leader depends on a match between the personal characteristics, the historical context and the followers’ psychological characteristics. The psychological structures of a text can generate identification in the audiences that recognize themselves in such structures and motives: the fact that ISIS is more concerned about females, means for example that ISIS is trying to connect with females and with people concerned with females. The fact that ISIS uses more “net-speak” means that the groups wants to connect with people who use the same language.

This is just a descriptive research that we hope can generate discussion. More research is needed in this area: we (myself and Ana-Maria) conducted more studies on ISIS language that are under review and will (hopefully) appear soon on this blog.

ISIS threat makes Italian Catholics more supportive of right-wing politicians who are hostile against Muslims

Only a tiny minority of Muslims supports ISIS. Yet, people in Western society when perceive higher threat from ISIS tend to become more hostile against all Muslims.

We provided evidence to support this proposition with an experiment conducted among Italian Catholics.

In an article just published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies I investigated with Enrico Tacchi the effect of ISIS threat on Catholic Italian voters.

The results of the experiment suggested that the threat of ISIS activated religious identity in Catholic Italian voters, and increased support for right-wing politicians who expressed hostility against Muslims.

The following figure shows the support for a center-right politician who says: “In Italy there is no space for Mosques” (higher scores mean more support for the politician). The red bar shows scores for participants who, before rating their agreement with the statement, were asked to read a newspaper article about ISIS threat on the Vatican. The blue bar shows the scores for participants in the control group, who were asked to read a different article not related to terrorism (about the Scottish referendum). If you are more curious about the methods that we used, please have a look at the article.

 

 

We believe that this study provides an important piece of empirical evidence for understanding the effects of the wave of anxiety arising from the Islamic terrorist threat that has recently hit Europe and that is probably not going to dissipate anytime soon.