Within a fairly short amount of time, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria(ISIS) has managed to put large swaths of land in Syria and Iraq under their. To many observers, the sheer speed at which this "state" was was dumbfounding. To better understand the roots of this and its supporters we present a study using data from Twitter. We by collecting large amounts of Arabic tweets referring to ISIS and them into pro-ISIS and anti-ISIS. This classification turns out to be done simply using the name variants used to refer to the organization: full name and the description as "state" is associated with support, abbreviations usually indicate opposition. We then "go back in time" by the historic timelines of both users supporting and opposing and look their pre-ISIS period to gain insights into the antecedents of support. To this, we build a classifier using pre-ISIS data to "predict", in, who will support or oppose the group. The key story that emerges is of frustration with failed Arab Spring revolutions. ISIS supporters largely from ISIS opposition in that they refer a lot more to Arab Spring that failed. We also find temporal patterns in the support and which seems to be linked to major news, such as reported territorial, reports on gruesome acts of violence, and reports on airstrikes and intervention.
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Magdy et al. (2015) studied this question.