Decoding the language of violence: an implicit motive analysis of social media posts to distinguish terrorists from non-terrorists

• Main Author: Chia, Sing Yann
• Other Authors: Ring Joyce Pang Shu Min
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Social sciences::Psychology
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/166376
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are exploited by terrorist organisations to conduct operations more effectively and recruit potential radicals. The pervasiveness of online radicalisation suggests the importance of harnessing open-source social media data to assess the current risks and identify potential terrorists. Most research to date use text-based analysis to examine terrorism on a group level only. To address these research gaps, this paper focuses on examining the implicit motives of terrorists versus non-terrorists on an individual level. The present study aims to investigate the utility of examining the levels of power motives and affiliation motives exhibited in social media postings as a means of distinguishing terrorists from non-terrorists and predicting violent terrorist activity. Using Winter’s (1994) coding manual, a content analysis was conducted on social media posts from identified groups of 17 foreign fighters and 18 sympathisers. The results indicate that fighters express significantly higher levels of power motives in their social media posts as compared to their non-violent counterparts. While no significant temporal trends were found in the time-analysis of power motives leading to the onset of terrorist acts, results did show that fighters showed a significantly higher level of power motives at 1-month prior to attack as compared to sympathisers. This highlights the importance of contextual factors surrounding an individual that may add on to the understanding of terrorist behaviour. Overall, these findings suggest that examining the levels of implicit motives expressed in social media posts could be a valuable tool for counter-terrorism efforts.