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Analyzing the semantic content and persuasive composition of extremist media: A case study of texts produced during the Gaza conflict

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Abstract

While terrorism informatics research has examined the technical composition of extremist media, there is less work examining the content and intent behind such media. We propose that the arguments and issues presented in extremist media provide insights into authors’ intent, which in turn may provide an evidence-base for detecting and assessing risk. We explore this possibility by applying two quantitative text-analysis methods to 50 online texts that incite violence as a result of the 2008/2009 Israeli military action in Gaza and the West Bank territories. The first method—a content coding system that identifies the occurrence of persuasive devices—revealed a predominance of moral proof arguments within the texts, and evidence for distinguishable ‘profiles’ of persuasion use across different authors and different group affiliations. The second method—a corpus-linguistic technique that identifies the core concepts and narratives that authors use—confirmed the use of moral proof to create an in-group/out-group divide, while also demonstrating a movement from general expressions of discontent to more direct audience-orientated expressions of violence as conflict heightened. We conclude that multi-method analyses are a valuable approach to building both an evidence-based understanding of terrorist media use and a valid set of applications within terrorist informatics.

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Notes

  1. We develop this term from media studies’ accounts (Cottle 2006; Fuller 2007; Postman 2000) of the global mediated environment within which geographically dispersed individuals can be connected, for instance producers of extremist media and their potential audiences.

  2. PT also divided the ten texts into thought units, which we compared to the original coding using standard measures. The two coders were easily able to identify thought units within the texts reliably (Guetzkow score = .02).

  3. The reliability for the ‘pre-’ data coding was 80% (κ = .77); the reliability of the ‘post-’ data coding was 86% (κ = .84).

  4. Visit: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/ and http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/usas/ for details of this software, including online access. The USAS pages also provide details of the full tag set, and details on how it is possible to make comparisons of composition between texts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK, LA1 4YF

    Sheryl Prentice & Paul J. Taylor

  2. School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

    Paul Rayson

  3. Department of Culture, Film, and Media, Nottingham University, Nottingham, UK

    Andrew Hoskins

  4. Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, Egham, UK

    Ben O’Loughlin

Authors
  1. Sheryl Prentice
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  2. Paul J. Taylor
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  3. Paul Rayson
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  4. Andrew Hoskins
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  5. Ben O’Loughlin
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Correspondence to Paul J. Taylor.

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Prentice, S., Taylor, P.J., Rayson, P. et al. Analyzing the semantic content and persuasive composition of extremist media: A case study of texts produced during the Gaza conflict. Inf Syst Front 13, 61–73 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-010-9272-y

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