ISIS in the Eyes of the Dutch

The presence of militant group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is growing. Terrorist attacks in Europe and an incoming stream of refugees in the south of the continent are some of the reasons Europe is getting socially involved in the Middle-Eastern war. It might seem that the Netherlands could become a target of the organization too. But are Dutch citizens concerned about this? In this paper, we describe the reaction of the Dutch on ISIS by analyzing what they say on Twitter about the organization. With the use of text classification, topic modeling and visualization tools, we were able to retrieve Tweets about ISIS and create a network graph displaying the ten main topics about ISIS which Dutch people tweeted about, in addition to a word cloud, displaying the words which were most used in the Tweets. The visualizations are used to analyze what topics people discussed most regarding ISIS on Twitter and how they felt about these topics. Understanding the social network responses to ISIS’ attacks can give us some clues to understand its impact on the society.