Modeling Drone Strikes, Piracy, Social Media Networks of ISIS, and Xenophobia

Image of Daesh Twitter networks from Shasheen.

I might be biased, but there are a lot of interesting things that are happening in George Mason’s Computational Social Science Department. These include modeling drone strikes to figure out the effect on terrorism, using agent-based models (ABMs) to assess maritime piracy countermeasures, and various analyses of social media on Daesh and xenophobia.

During this semester (Spring 2016), four students shared what they were working on. Please note, that I am not an expert in these areas, and it is entirely possible that I hacked up something that one these students is working on.

1. Are Drone Strikes Effective in Combatting Terrorism? (Brandon A. Shapiro)

Under the Obama administration, drone strikes have increased tenfold, but are they effective? Shapiro built a model where the agents were terrorists, civilians, military, and drones in order to answer that question. What he found was that targeted drone strikes appear to be effective in combatting terrorism with fewer ground force military agents killed and fewer civilian agents killed than would be in strikes without drones. The policy implication is that the U.S. should continue to use drone strikes in the war on terror.

2. A simple ABM Assessing Maritime Piracy Countermeasure (Ciara Sibley)

Around the Horn of Africa, there is a hot spot of piracy, which costs the global economy an estimated $7 billion. Now, there is a new hot spot in the gulf of Guinea. How do we stop this? Sibley proposed a solution with ABMs.

Image of the piracy model and break down of agents.

Sibley built a model that consisted of merchants, pirates, and police (naval warships). The pirates look for merchants to rob. The police protect merchants. There are a lot more merchants than police. Police respond to pirate sightings to defend the merchants. Sibley found that if the police force is not present, then it is a better practice for the merchants to not be alert for pirates at all. This is because the merchant will waste all their fuel trying to evade the pirates, but will still get caught. If the police force is present, the merchants have a fighting chance, so they should be aware and call the police. This is worth the extra fuel to evade pirates.

3. Use of Social Media and the Case of Daesh: An Information Warfare Perspective (Joseph Shasheen)

(Note: Daesh is ISIS.)

Daesh uses Twitter for marketing, and Shasheen is studying how, and to what extent. Tweets used in his study were bounded and did not include English-language tweets by Europeans in English. Shasheen observed that the twitter network and messaging is organized disorganization. Shasheen initially found that there were about 2:1 opposers (green line, those who use Daesh) vs supporters (orange and blue, those use ISIS or something else), but later found that Daesh created hundreds of accounts, so the 2:1 may be inflated. Also, it should be noted that both supporters and opposers took a break during Ramadan, which is noted in the frequency graph with a red box.

Image of the frequency of tweets. The red box denotes Ramadan. The green line denotes opposers of ISIS — those who use Daesh, and the orange and blue lines denote supporters of ISIS.

Shasheen concludes that Daesh behavior is evolutionary, self-repairing, and results in a self-reinforcing of highly centralized networks. To combat this, Shasheen suggests breaking these networks, making the transaction costs so expensive (difficult) that they just give up on Twitter by identifying communities through automated methods, followed by human verification, and removing entire communities of accounts.

4. Xenophobia, Under a Computational Lens (Tahla Oz)

Oz is currently researching literature on xenophobia. One study Oz presented was on the race effects of Ebay (2015). Where a similar item was sold on Ebay using a variation in skin tones from different races (African-American and Caucasian). It was found that the sale price was, on average, 37 cents more if the item for sale was held by a Caucasian hand versus an African-American hand. A study on Craiglist (2010), has had similar results with 13% fewer responses and 18% fewers offers if the hand displaying the item was African-American versus Caucasian.

As Oz highlighted, according to a Pew survey, the majority of respondents said that immigrants are making the economy, crime, and social and moral values worse in the United States, but APA, NBER-1, NBER-2 , and CATO tell a different tale:

• “In the long term, immigrants create more jobs than they take, lowering unemployment”
• “Immigration is strongly associated with increased productivity”
• “Cultural diversity is linked to increased wages and innovation”
• “Children of immigrants are equally or more civically engaged than those of US-born parents”
• “Immigration is generally not associated with crime”