Discussing the Islamic State on Twitter

Matteo Colombo is Junior Research Fellow at the Clingendael Institute, The Netherlands, and Associate Research Fellow in the Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI). He obtained a PhD in Political Studies at the University of Milan, Italy. His main interests are in social media, political reforms, jihadism, and energy policy in the Middle East.Luigi Curini is Professor in Political Science in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Milan, Italy. His research focuses on party competition, comparative politics, quantitative methods, machine learning and text analytics. He has published over 50 articles in international academic peer-reviewed journals such as Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Research, among others. He is also author of seven books and co-editor of The SAGE Handbook of Research Methods in Political Science and International Relations (with Robert J. Franzese, 2020).

• Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: The research methodology.- Chapter 3: Detecting the Sentiment towards IS and its evolution.- Chapter 4: A thematic study of the topics in the pro-IS and anti-IS tweets.- Chapter 5: The enemy of my enemy? Hostility and sectarian discourse between pro-IS and anti-IS Arabic-speaking Twitter users.- Chapter 6: Conclusion.