The Islamic State (also known as ISIS) militant group has become experts at utilizing Twitter in order to spread their propaganda using social media. The big question is, who is running the show? Many different social media users. An article posted by the Huffington Post covers the topic thoroughly. Extremism expert J.M. Berger and Jonathon Morgan of Ushahidi ("an international nonprofit dedicated to open-source technology") estimate that there are about 46,000 Twitter accounts that are run by supporters of ISIS. Their studies have also made note of the fact that these accounts have a larger average following than the typical Twitter user. According to the chart presented in the article the majority of accounts claim to be located in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iraq. Iraq has an estimate of about 453 claimed accounts and the United States does not fall far behind with 404. "In December 2014, the militant group ordered its followers to switch location date off, but the study found this command was widely disregarded."
So how much do they tweet on average? Isis users are the most active users. Each user on average tweets about 7 times a day. "The study found that 62-percent of supporters had tweeted in the previous 30 days, compared to just 13 percent of all Twitter users." Their follower ratio also differs dramatically from the average Twitter user. ISIS supporters have an average of 1,004 followers where as the regular Twitter user has an average of only 208. The "hyperactive" users who are extremely active compared to other supporters, tweet up to 50 times a day each. There is about 18,425 users who that average is based off of. Just those accounts alone could reach up to 900,000 tweets a day combined if they all tweeted 50 times.
ISIS has also taught their followers and promoters to be strategic in their postings. Bursts of tweets in a short period of time makes it easier to get hashtags to trend, making the propaganda more noticeable to the general public. "To have that many accounts in a very disciplined way out there doing the same thing everyday is a pretty powerful tool." J.M. Berger tells the New York Times. Luckily, Twitter's action taken to shut down any accounts promoting them has stalled and diverted time away from more propaganda being posted and more people being recruited.
(This chart courtesy of the Huffington Post shows the location that enabled accounts claim to be in.)