Explaining Media Terrorism Focusing on ISIL's Use of Social Networks (Twitter and Facebook) with a Meta-Synthesis Approach

Media terrorism is an emerging form of terrorism that through discourse-building, psychological operations, and recruitment, it has acted to influence, attract support and engage with various groups and by working on social networks, especially Twitter and Facebook, they use cyberspace frantically to create mass fear and panic. The aim of research was explaining the media terrorism of the ISIL group in social networks with a meta-synthesis approach. As per, 135 research were reviewed as a preliminary sample in databases of Emerald, Wiley, Science Direct, SID, Sage, Google Scholar, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Magiran, Iran.doc and Noormags in the period from 2010 to 2020. After screening 36 studies were selected by purposive sampling method and results were combined using Atlas.ti software. The results led to the identification of 6 main categories, 25 concepts and 129 indicators that the central elements of the model were include foreign and regional intervention, ethnic tensions, and regional and trans-regional supports, propaganda and social mobilization, anonymity, funding, media tricks, culture building of violence, and the confrontation of the countries of the world. Managing content analysis, reviewing in policy making of social networks, exploring security aspects of various dimensions of terrorism on social media, and reviewing information gateway policy are some of the policy recommendations.