Abstract
The advancement in technology has brought a new era in
terrorism where Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become a major platform of
communication with wide range of usage from message channelling to propaganda
and recruitment of new followers in terrorist groups. Meanwhile, during the
terrorist attacks people use OSNs for information exchange, mobilizing and
uniting and raising money for the victims. This paper critically analyses the
specific usage of OSNs in the times of terrorisms attacks in developing
countries. We crawled and used Twitter’s data during Westgate shopping mall
terrorist attack in Nairobi, Kenya. We then analysed the number of tweets,
ge-location of tweets, demographics of the users and whether users in
developing countries tend to tweet, retweet or reply during the event of a
terrorist attack. We define new metrics (reach and impression of the tweet) and
present the models for calculating them. The study findings show that, users
from developing countries tend to tweet more at the first and critical times of
the terrorist occurrence. Moreover, large number of tweets originated from the
attacked country (Kenya) with 73% from men and 23% from women where original
posts had a most number of tweets followed by replies and retweets.
This research work was published in International Journal of Computer Science and Network Solutions (ISSN: 2345 - 3397)Volume 1 issue 4.
