ISIS and Information Cascades
Information cascade experts are stepping up their efforts to fight the cyber war against ISIS, who has increasingly started using methods of online recruitment. This movement has become very efficient in its social media tactics. This is done by targeting alienated individuals who lack a sense of belonging. CyberSocio Intelligent-Systems Laboratory (CySIS) at Arizona State University have begun research to help stop the spread of ISIS ideology online. This team is developing tools that detect ISIS extremist networks that promote their violent ideology and block their content from spreading. The idea of “information cascades” is an integral part of CySIS’s research. They have developed ways of detecting the severity of a message’s ability to spread online to different networks. This research generated from CySIS will also help inform the US military in fighting against terrorist ideology online.
Information cascades develop when people withdraw their own information about the subject and favor earlier people’s actions. This is a major idea in ISIS’s online recruitment. They are trying to target the alone and alienated people on the web by going through various networks and connecting the target and themselves. They essentially bombarding these people with their ideologies from different channels to the point where these vulnerable people dismiss their own information and follow ISIS. CySIS is trying to counteract this online recruitment by stopping this information cascade before it happens.
Source: http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/27/researchers-from-arizona-state-university-take-the-war-online-back-to-isis/