State of the art 2015: a literature review of social media intelligence capabilities for counter-terrorism

Overview This paper is a review of how information and insight can be drawn from open social media sources. It focuses on the specific research techniques that have emerged, the capabilities they provide, the possible insights they offer, and the ethical and legal questions they raise. These techniques are considered relevant and valuable in so far as they can help to maintain public safety by preventing terrorism, preparing for it, protecting the public from it and pursuing its perpetrators. The report also considers how far this can be achieved against the backdrop of radically changing technology and public attitudes towards surveillance. This is an updated version of a 2013 report paper on the same subject, State of the Art. Since 2013, there have been significant changes in social media, how it is used by terrorist groups, and the methods being developed to make sense of it.  The paper is structured as follows: Part 1 is an overview of social media use, focused on how it is used by groups of interest to those involved in counter-terrorism. This includes new sections on trends of social media platforms; and a new section on Islamic State (IS). Part 2 provides an introduction to the key approaches of social media intelligence (henceforth ‘SOCMINT’) for counter-terrorism. Part 3 sets out a series of SOCMINT techniques. For each technique a series of capabilities and insights are considered, the validity and reliability of the method is considered, and how they might be applied to counter-terrorism work explored. Part 4 outlines a number of important legal, ethical and practical considerations when undertaking SOCMINT work

The Semiosis of Civil Society: Theorizing the Media in Postcolonial Polities

My dissertation is an attempt to construct a theoretical framework for the distinctive nature of the mass media in the postcolonial political context through an engagement with the theoretical legacy of Indian political theory and historiography, especially the Subaltern Studies school. I draw from Partha Chatterjee’s conceptualization of Indian politics as divided into the two spheres of civil and political society and interpret these political categories through the rubric of mass media and televisual discourse, both to locate the mass media in the discourse and practice of politics, and to also locate political practice as it takes place in a mediatized context. To extend Chatterjee’s understanding of the postcolonial polity, I map these political categories to Jean Baudrillard’s understanding of human communication that is divided between the symbolic and semiotic domains. I trace Baudrillard’s theoretical trajectory from Durkheim and Marx through social anthropology and media theory. I also try to interpret his categories through Marx’s concept of the subsumption of labor under capital as a metaphor to understand how the thread of capitalist modernity runs through them. I posit that the nation-form is the essential embodiment of capitalist modernity in the context of a mediatized political sphere where the nation is essentially what Baudrillard calls a simulacrum, and I try to understand it as a semiotic discourse that is located within the realm of civil society. I explore this aspect of the relationship between media and politics through instances of the mass-mediation of the symbolic domain of political society. Finally I argue that it is the symbolic domain that is the dominant aspect of communication in the postcolonial context, and it is a recovery of the symbolic that will provide a political challenge radical enough to destabilize the semiotic realm of capitalist modernity. This recovery can only take place if the mass media shifts its location from civil society to the democratic challenges of political society. A radical theory of the media in the postcolonial context will be one that will enable this shift by critically engaging with the absences and silences of the symbolic within current media discourse

Understanding Social Media through Large Volume Measurements

The amount of user-generated web content has grown drastically in the past 15 years and many social media services are exceedingly popular nowadays. In this thesis we study social media content creation and consumption through large volume measurements of three prominent social media services, namely Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Common to the services is that they have millions of users, they are free to use, and the users of the services can both create and consume content. The motivation behind this thesis is to examine how users create and consume social media content, investigate why social media services are as popular as they are, what drives people to contribute on them, and see if it is possible to model the conduct of the users. We study how various aspects of social media content be that for example its creation and consumption or its popularity can be measured, characterized, and linked to real world occurrences. We have gathered more than 20 million tweets, metadata of more than 10 million YouTube videos and a complete six-year page view history of 19 different Wikipedia language editions. We show, for example, daily and hourly patterns for the content creation and consumption, content popularity distributions, characteristics of popular content, and user statistics. We will also compare social media with traditional news services and show the interaction with social media, news, and stock prices. In addition, we combine natural language processing with social media analysis, and discover interesting correlations between news and social media content. Moreover, we discuss the importance of correct measurement methods and show the effects of different sampling methods using YouTube measurements as an example.Sosiaalisen median suosio ja sen käyttäjien luoman sisällön määrä on kasvanut valtavasti viimeisen 15 vuoden aikana ja palvelut kuten Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube ja Wikipedia ovat erittäin suosittuja. Tässä väitöskirjassa tarkastellaan sosiaalisen median sisällön luonti- ja kulutusmalleja laajavoluumisen mittausdatan kautta. Väitöskirja sisältää mittausdataa Twitter-, YouTube- ja Wikipedia -palveluista. Yhteistä näille kolmelle palvelulle on muuan muassa se, että niillä on miljoonia käyttäjiä, niitä voi käyttää maksutta ja käyttäjät voivat luoda sekä kuluttaa sisältöä. Mittausdata sisältää yli 20 miljoona Twitter -viestiä, metadatatietoja yli kymmenestä miljoonasta YouTube -videosta ja täydellisen artikkelien katselukertojen tiedot kuudelta vuodelta 19 eri Wikipedian kieliversiosta. Tutkimuksen tarkoituksena on tarkastella kuinka käyttäjät luovat ja kuluttavat sisältöä sekä löytää niihin liittyviä malleja, joita voi hyödyntää tiedon jaossa, replikoinnissa ja tallentamisessa. Tutkimuksessa pyritään siis selvittämään miksi miksi sosiaalisen median palvelut ovat niin suosittuja kuin ne nyt ovat, mikä saa käyttäjät tuottamaan sisältöä niihin ja onko palveluiden käyttöä mahdollista mallintaa ja ennakoida. Väitöskirjassa verrataan myös sosiaalisen median ja tavallisten uutispalveluiden luonti- ja kulutusmalleja. Lisäksi näytetään kuinka sosiaalisen median sisältö, uutiset ja pörssikurssi hinnat ovat vuorovaikutuksessa toisiinsa. Väitöskirja sisältää myös pohdintaa oikean mittausmenetelmän valinnasta ja käyttämisestä sekä näytetään eri mittausmenetelmien vaikutuksista tuloksiin YouTube -mittausdatan avulla

Directional adposition use in English, Swedish and Finnish

Directional adpositions such as to the left of describe where a Figure is in relation to a Ground. English and Swedish directional adpositions refer to the location of a Figure in relation to a Ground, whether both are static or in motion. In contrast, the Finnish directional adpositions edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) solely describe the location of a moving Figure in relation to a moving Ground (Nikanne, 2003). When using directional adpositions, a frame of reference must be assumed for interpreting the meaning of directional adpositions. For example, the meaning of to the left of in English can be based on a relative (speaker or listener based) reference frame or an intrinsic (object based) reference frame (Levinson, 1996). When a Figure and a Ground are both in motion, it is possible for a Figure to be described as being behind or in front of the Ground, even if neither have intrinsic features. As shown by Walker (in preparation), there are good reasons to assume that in the latter case a motion based reference frame is involved. This means that if Finnish speakers would use edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) more frequently in situations where both the Figure and Ground are in motion, a difference in reference frame use between Finnish on one hand and English and Swedish on the other could be expected. We asked native English, Swedish and Finnish speakers’ to select adpositions from a language specific list to describe the location of a Figure relative to a Ground when both were shown to be moving on a computer screen. We were interested in any differences between Finnish, English and Swedish speakers. All languages showed a predominant use of directional spatial adpositions referring to the lexical concepts TO THE LEFT OF, TO THE RIGHT OF, ABOVE and BELOW. There were no differences between the languages in directional adpositions use or reference frame use, including reference frame use based on motion. We conclude that despite differences in the grammars of the languages involved, and potential differences in reference frame system use, the three languages investigated encode Figure location in relation to Ground location in a similar way when both are in motion. Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference and Molyneux’s question: Crosslingiuistic evidence. In P. Bloom, M.A. Peterson, L. Nadel & M.F. Garrett (Eds.) Language and Space (pp.109-170). Massachusetts: MIT Press. Nikanne, U. (2003). How Finnish postpositions see the axis system. In E. van der Zee & J. Slack (Eds.), Representing direction in language and space. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Walker, C. (in preparation). Motion encoding in language, the use of spatial locatives in a motion context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Lincoln, Lincoln. United Kingdo