Back in September last year, we worked with Recorded Future, an open-source intelligence firm, to examine how Islamic State (IS) was using Twitter and other social media to spread its message. Our analysis found that 60,000 pro-IS Twitter accounts had been set up in six months.

Recorded Future have taken another look to see how the situation has changed, digging through a total of 44 million tweets — 15.8 million of those from 2015. And social media seems to work as a dim mirror for events on the ground.

First, there’s a lot more activity. Recorded Future says that the number of IS-related tweets grew from August to October in 2014, then declined for the rest of the year. But there’s been an explosion of activity in 2015 — almost entirely due to tweets written in Arabic rather than English. Arabic is now the dominant language for tweets discussing IS — that used to be English. This graph shows the difference: English is blue, Arabic is red.

Two countries are mainly responsible for that growth — Saudi Arabia is the biggest contributor, followed by Egypt, which saw a 483 per cent increase from February to January. That’s based on the 10 per cent of all tweets that are geotagged.

Second, the majority of those Arabic tweets are negative about Islamic State. They also follow specific events: the two Japanese journalists, the video showing the burning of Jordanian pilot Muad Al-Kasasbeh and the murder of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya all lead to spikes of negative tweets. The murder of Al-Kasasbeh prompted the biggest negative reaction — with 1.2 million tweets condemning the attack in Arabic alone.

That said, those three events also lead to spikes in tweets praising or supporting IS violence. This had been fairly stable from June to the end of January 2015. Then, with Al-Kasasbeh’s murder, positive tweets increased by a factor of six.

Another new feature: bots. Staffan Truvé, the chief technology officer of Recorded Future, identified several non-human tweeters, some of which have been suspended by Twitter. Truve looked at closer at one apparently automated campaign, though. Various accounts started tweeting support for Saudi Arabian forces on January 28, to the tune of 25,000 tweets a day. None of the 2,463 accounts had tweeted more than 104 times per day. This, and the fact that the accounts didn’t tweet much on Fridays, led to a surprising conclusion: “this campaign the clear appearance of a manual campaign engaging a fair number of accounts to create an impact.” So human, after all. 25,000 tweets in a month is a seriously impressive haul for even the most dedicated human tweeter (I haven’t even managed 7,000 in six years…).

Bing tells me the hashtag translates as: “God help us and keep the security and military officers of both ♥ of the country’s keepers watched after God”

So what can the social data tell us?

It seems fairly clear that the increased Twitter concern in Saudi Arabia and Egypt is responding to increased IS operations throughout the Middle East (the UAE, Israel, Jordan and Oman all also saw big increases). The two big Twitter spikes concerned two nations dealing with IS executions for the first time: Jordan and Egypt (there was also another mass-murder by IS of Egyptian “spies” in the northern Sinai in February), and the Egyptian Coptic Christians were killed in Libya, another new front for the group.

As Truvé puts it: “I think we can at least see which countries are stepping up their efforts in the conflict — the big increase in tweets from Saudi Arabia and the campaign we identified is a good example of that.”

In the West, we’ve maybe grown weary of engaging with IS on Twitter, or have decided that we’d rather not give their regular outrages any more publicity. In the Middle East, though, Twitter users are increasingly preoccupied.

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