Computational mining of social media to curb terrorism

In the ever-connected social networking era, terrorists exploit social media platforms via sophisticated approaches. To curb these activities, a rich collection of computational methods was developed. This article surveys the use of social media by terrorists, followed by a temporal classification framework that overviews computational countermeasures at four major stages, including inception of an attack, immediately before an attack, onset of an attack, and after an attack. The literature surveyed was organized around the four temporal stages. The resulting survey is summarized in a table with the main technology used in each stage based on the time of the attack.