IS Twitter accounts number 46,000: study

Islamic State has about 2000 "hyperactive" supporters on Twitter out of about 46,000 accounts linked to the extremist network, a new study says.

Researchers from the US-based Brookings Institution attempted a census of IS supporters on the increasingly popular social media platform.

The study found at least 46,000 Twitter accounts were used by IS supporters, mostly located in Iraq and Syria and regions contested by the group.

But some were identified in Australia, Indonesia, France, the UK and Brazil.

However the group had a relatively small number of hyperactive users, with between 500 and 2000 accounts tweeting in concentrated bursts of high volume.

Twitter suspended at least 1000 accounts linked to the extremist group in the final quarter of 2014, focusing its attention on IS-linked accounts that tweeted most often and had the most followers.

Three-quarters of those who tweeted had selected Arabic as their language, with about 20 per cent tweeting in English.

IS-supporter accounts had an average 1000 followers each - well above the ordinary Twitter user, the study said.

The most common device used to tweet was an Android smartphone (69 per cent), followed by the iPhone (30 per cent) and Blackberry (one per cent).

As for hashtags, the most often used were variations of the spelling of "Islamic State" in Arabic, or the Arabic word for "urgent" as in breaking news.

The study authors called on governments and social media companies to co-ordinate their response to extremism on social media.