Terrorist attacks are designed to 'terrorise, polarise and mobilise' their multiple audiences. In a sense, then, they function as teachable moments, where the perpetrators try to teach 'a lesson' to their 'adversaries'. At the same time, however, governments use these events to instruct the wider public about the risks that have to be managed, and how public life and values will not be modified by them. The Director of the Crime and Security Research Institute shows how by applying cutting-edge social media analytics, we can learn from past attacks about how terrorist violence tries to work.
