Terrorist groups are alive and well--al-Shabaab

National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START ) reports:  “Before its account was suspended by Twitter Jan. 25, 2013, the Somali jihadist group al-Shabaab had been using Twitter actively -- sending about 1,250 tweets to its more than 20,000 followers since December 2011. The primary goal of the group’s (@HSMPress) tweets had been to engage with English-speaking supporters and promote its own overarching narrative of current events.  In its tweets, the group frames invading East African forces and the Transitional Federal Government as Western proxies at war with Muslims in Somalia.”

“Violent Jihadism in Real Time: Al-Shabaab’s Use of Twitter” is the name of the report.

“Using an analytical tool from Topsy, which provides deep, comprehensive analyses of hundreds of billions of Tweets and web pages gathered from millions of unique websites, blogs and social media services, the researchers also evaluated the reach of al-Shabaab’s Twitter account. Al-Shabaab’s most prolific tweets included those about how Hurricane Sandy was a small fraction of the destruction the U.S. deserves, and how the horrors of 7/7 and 7/21 will be eclipsed by what is looming on Britain’s shores. Such analysis shows that the group’s cumulative exposure had grown over the past year.”