The Islamic State (ISIS) has been relying on social media to promote its extremist views and to recruit new fighters for its terrorist activities. The jihadist organisation, however, seems to be losing the battle online, much like how it is losing ground in the Middle East.
A new report from the George Washington University Program on Extremism revealed that the number of pro-ISIS accounts on Twitter and their followers are already declining.
The study involved observation of more than 1,000 Twitter accounts with posts supportive of the ISIS and maintained by users publicising content that promote the extremist group's cause. The research was done from June to October last year.
The researchers said the ISIS' English-language social networks are "extremely insular, meaning users mostly follow and interact with each other."
They, however, observed that the number of Twitter users who are based in Iraq and Syria "appears to have declined over time."
J.M. Berger, one of the authors of the report, attributed this decline to "diminishing returns."
"They're still there ... but a lot of their key functions have been severely limited. And they're spending a lot more time just trying to stay online rather than do the work," Berger told The Business Insider.
The researchers also noted how the average tweets per day from pro-ISIS accounts likewise declined during the time of the study. This limits the reach of the jihadist organisation on Twitter, meaning it will be more difficult for random users to stumble upon pro-ISIS content.
"It's still an effective recruiting platform, but the burden of making first contact is increasingly shifting to the recruit instead of the recruiter," Berger explained. "These changes I think have severely limited their ability to broadcast."
The study's author, however, warned that pro-ISIS individuals may still set up new social media accounts to promote extremism.
"This [report] is fundamentally aimed at the idea that it's pointless to ... try and suppress these guys on social media because they'll just come back at the same level that they did," Berger explained.
"People have been mounting that argument for a couple of years now, and there's now a substantial amount of evidence that that's not true," he added.
