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A cyberterrorist behind the keyboard

An automated text analysis for psycholinguistic profiling and threat assessment

ORCiD logo with link | Charles Darwin University, Australia
ORCiD logo with link | Charles Darwin University, Australia
ORCiD logo with link | Charles Darwin University, Australia
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

This article was made Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license through payment of an APC by or on behalf of the authors.

Published online: 3 September 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00120.eta
Abstract
Given the diverse backgrounds of people living in modern societies as well as the international nature of cyber-terrorist threats, profiling the type of person behind cyber-mediated crimes has become a norm in terrorist profiling practice. This study contributes to timely efficient terrorist profiling and threat assessment by showcasing an automated content analysis of cyber-mediated terrorist texts, using natural language processing technology and AI-assisted analysis. To characterise the terrorist type of texts and provide clues to threats, the study employs a ‘psycholinguistic profiling’ approach to authorship analysis (Grant, Tim. 2008. “Approaching Questions in Forensic Authorship Analysis.” In Dimensions of Forensic Linguistics, edited by John Gibbons, and Teresa Turell, 215–229. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). That is, it seeks to describe the likelihood of an author’s engagement in violent extremist activity, identify motives for violence, and provide clues vis-a-vis would-be and actual violent behaviours. The study takes twenty texts produced by international terrorists involved in jihadism and far-right violent extremism as a case study. The findings reveal the investigative value of automated psycholinguistic profiling for security and intelligence practitioners, with the semantic patterns yielding helpful information for an understanding of the criminal nature of terrorist language. Also revealed is the attentional pattern of extremists and their discourse together with clues-based conclusions about text type, as well as ‘warning’ behaviours and motives for aggression which vary according to the authors’ ideological differences.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review: Cyberterrorism and linguistic focus in terrorist profiling
    • 2.1Social aspects of cyberterrorism: Social cyberterrorism
    • 2.2Linguistic focus in terrorist profiling
    • 2.3Lexical semantic level of content analysis
    • 2.4LIWC in psycholinguistic analysis: Identifying attentional patterns
    • 2.5ChatGPT as a complementary analysis tool
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Data
    • 3.2Data analysis procedure
      • 3.2.1LIWC-based computational analysis
      • 3.2.2ChatGPT and TRAP-18 based analysis
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Themes and conceptual patterns as clues to text type and likelihood of engagement in terrorism: Comparing the four sub-corpora with Smith’s (2004) reference controls
    • 4.2Clues to characteristic concerns and drives across the four sub-corpora
    • 4.3ChatGPT-informed themes as clues to text type and purpose of texts
  • 5.Conclusion
  • References
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Cited by one other publication

Etaywe, Awni
2025. Conceptual Burstiness in Sociolinguistic Profiling of Radical-Criminal Communications: Corpus Method-Assisted Meaning Extraction for Investigative Leads. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 38:3 ► pp. 953 ff. DOI logo

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