This tool presents a small part of the analysis produced via BlackLight.

This version was used in the session The Persistent Online Presence: The Shift in Platform Exploitation Over Time, part of the Progressive Terrorism Studies Webinar Series hosted by RUSI. How the Salafi-Jihadi movement has been able to exploit the internet to distribute their message has been a key concern of those seeking to challenge these narratives.

In 2019 Emily Winterbotham, Dr Ali Fisher and Dr Nico Prucha published the largest ever study of traffic between the online platforms that comprise the Jihadi information ecosystem.

The 2019 study examined 24 months of data from the core of the Salafi-Jihadi Telegram network and revealed the inner workings of their multiplatform communication paradigm. The paper demonstrated the different roles that platforms play within the multiplatform information ecosystem, including Telegram, Tamtam, and Matrix.

This new study analyses 3 years of data collected in near realtime.

Dataset
- 6.4 million updates.
- 4.6 million observations of URL sharing.
- 200,000 Unique URL. 

Select a platform from the dropdown menu to highlight the shifts in exploitation of that platform / site over time by the core of the Salafi-Jihadi information ecosystem.

Fullscreen version available here.

To increase load speed this is a compressed version of the analysis;

- only showing select domains,
- values are daily,
- presented as a seven day rolling mean.

This large-scale analysis provides a strategic level overview of the way the Salafi-Jihadi movement has operated since Telegram became its primary platform for communicating with supporters. By examining the URL they share, it shows the breadth of their presence across platforms and provides the evidence base through which to identify detectable patterns in the use of different online services.

The session showed there correlations between the use of different platforms, and that co-citation style network analysis could be a useful approach to detect clusters of platforms which are used collectively. The slides from the session are available here.