• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, February 7, 2014

Your standard model civil war has two sides fighting it out, but as anyone trying to follow recent events in the Middle East has doubtless realized, the Syrian conflict is far from being a standard model anything.

To help understand this ongoing tragedy in all its complexity -- including sectarian, regional, ethnic, economic and ideological divisions -- researchers at University College London, Dublin City University and University of Vienna have applied community analysis algorithms to social media to delineate some of the main communal factions.
 
The results, summed up in an article titled “Online Social Media in the Syria Conflict: Encompassing the Extremes and the In-Betweens,” looked at over 650 Twitter accounts that post content about the civil war, most of them located in Syria. but also with a fair number maintained by Syrian expats in Europe and elsewhere.

The piece analyzed just over 1.75 million tweets from 2012-2013, as well as 14,629 YouTube channels linked to by these Twitter users.
 
The researchers identified four main groups, not all necessarily opposed to each other, most of which were composed of a number of sub-communities. These include a jihadist group containing three communities, a pro-Assad group with just one community, a secular-moderate group with 10 communities, and a Kurdish group with two communities. Some members of these groups and communities overlapped, with many focusing on specific regions or cities.
 
The multifaceted nature of the conflict is summed up by the Arabic slogan of one prominent member of the moderate-secular group, who explicitly opposes both the regime and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS): “from the sky [we face] the barrels of Bashar [al-Assad] and the car bombs of al-Baghdadi [ISIS leader] on the ground.”
 
Last week, I wrote about the role of social media in recruiting aspiring jihadists from Europe to fight in Syria. According to Gilles de Kerchove, the European Union’s counter-terrorism coordinator, social media plays a “huge role” in recruiting aspiring jihadists from Europe to fight in Syria: “A lot of these young jihadists are narcissists. They want to be portrayed with a Kalashnikov, they put themselves, their pictures, on YouTube, Facebook. They try to encourage colleagues, friends to join.”

De Kerchove said the EU has contacted the big social-media companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, to discuss implementing policies to enable removal of content that encourages violence, with an eye to limiting jihadist recruiting.