For the past few weeks, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, better known as ISIS, has been making international news for its threats against the United States. As the militant group gets more and more publicity, that means more Internet users are going to be Googling its name to find out who the group is and if we should be concerned about them.
One would imagine users in the U.S. would be the most curious about ISIS, seeing as how it has targeted the nation. However, that actually might not be the case.
Indonesia has made the most Google searches for the term "isis," according to Google Trends data collected during the past year, as reported by The Daily Dot. The country, which has the world's largest Muslim population, is followed by Brazil, the U.S., Malta, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago and Lebanon in terms of regional interest in the search term. However, as The Daily Dot points out, Brazil's searches are probably mostly for Brazilian actress Ísis Valverde, since her name appears in the list of related searches in the data.
Searches for "james foley," after the news of the American journalist's beheading by ISIS broke, yielded different results. Americans were of course very interested in the topic, but they still ranked behind Norwegians and the Irish, who took the No.1 and No. 2 spots, respectively, in terms of Google searches. These countries were followed by Australia, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Norway held the top spot in searches for "foley video" and "james foley video," which also followed a similar pattern.
As with most major events today, the Internet has been an integral part of disseminating news about ISIS' actions but also a part of even trying to stop and start them. When the news of Foley's beheading by the terrorist group hit the Internet, many found sharing the link to the video of the incident and images on Twitter not only distasteful but also aiding ISIS' intentions of releasing the footage. Twitter responded by suspending users who shared images or the video, and the social network announced that it would remove images of the deceased at the request of family members. The Daily Intelligencer also recently reported that a group of young western-born Muslim women have been using Twitter, Tumblr and Kik to communicate ISIS' cause, often using slang or emoji.
