One of ISIS's most important fronts, aside from the physical front lines in Iraq and Syria, is its reach online, through which it solicits recruits and radicalizes potential sympathizers — some of whom may then go on to launch terror attacks.
But there is some good news from the cyberspace front. According to a new report from George Washington University's Program on Extremism, ISIS's reach on Twitter has stopped growing and is being slowly rolled back.
The number of users in the pro-ISIS Twitter network has stagnated, the report found, and individual accounts are sending fewer tweets. Accounts that have been repeatedly suspected for tweeting pro-ISIS material have seen their reach decline as well.
It's not exactly a devastating defeat for ISIS, which maintains a significant online presence. But it's at least a glimmer of hope that efforts to curtail that presence are overcoming ISIS's once-rapid online growth.
The report is based on an investigation by J.M. Berger, a fellow with George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, and Heather Perez, a law enforcement analyst. They tracked a curated list of pro-ISIS twitter accounts between August and October 2015.
They found that the overall size and reach of ISIS Twitter was "stagnant, or in slight decline." The follower count of specific prominent users, in particular, had been "devastated." ISIS Twitter was, as a result, less active; the average number of tweets per day for an average pro-ISIS account consistently declined over the study period:
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