Counter Terrorism on Online Social Networks Using Web Mining Techniques

Online Social Networks (OSN) like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, YouTube and Digg are getting very popular nowadays. They have become a part of everybody's life as people use to share content like their opinions, feelings with other people. OSNs have also created some serious threats as some people steal personal information of OSN users, similarly some terrorists groups use it as a weapon to achieve certain goals like spread terror among innocent people, brainwashing and recruitment. Therefore, it is the need of the hour to counter such groups. Web mining can be employed to detect terrorism related activities on online social networks. In this paper some major web mining techniques have been discussed which can be helpful to identify such people and terrorism may be countered from OSN. Each technique is discussed thoroughly, and effectiveness along with its pros and cons are also presented. Hence, a number of future research directions are presented which can be undertaken to conduct and improve research in this area.