Understanding engagement with insurgents through retweet rhetoric

Organisations — including insurgent movements — harness social media to engage potential consumers. They evoke sympathetic (and antipathic) response; content sharing engenders affinity and community. We report on a pilot study of presumed rhetorical intent for statuses retweeted by a set of suspected Islamic State-sympathetic Twitter accounts. This annotation is orthogonal to prior opinion mining work focused on sentiment or stance expressed in a debate, and suggests a parallel to dialogue act classification applied to retweeting. By exploring the distribution of rhetoric among Islamic State-sympathetic and general users, we also hope to identify trends in IS social media use and user roles.