What Makes a Jihadist Text Popular?

Jihadist terrorism is a pressing issue for policy–makers and social scientists. Using data from 50 million page views on a jihadist website, we investigate what makes some jihadist writings more popular than others, and whether killing and capturing jihadist thinkers is an effective policy tool for reducing the popularity of their ideas. We find that the identity of the author is the strongest predictor of baseline popularity among jihadist readers. When authors are killed, the popularity of their documents temporarily increases, but we find no long–term effect.

• terrorism
• Richard Nielsen
• MIT
• FSS
• Jihadist text