The Arab Spring and Its Social Media Audiences: English and Arabic Twitter Users and Their Networks

Abstract

The “Arab Spring” uprisings in 2011 saw widespread anti-government protests, and some regime changes , in many Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries, from Libya and Tunisia to Bahrain and Syria. Social media were among the tools used by protesters to organize themselves and to disseminate footage from rallies. These were not only used by local activists, but also attracted comments from a worldwide media audience, for example in Twitter hashtag conversations such as #egypt and #libya. These hashtags were used to mediate a wide range of practices of political participation among a diverse group of social media users-from distanced observation and information-sharing in a globalized “ambient journalism” 1 environment through to narration of direct experience and even coordination of on-the-ground activities. However, there is no reason to assume that these diverse activities were really “connected” via the hashtag, or that one geographically or culturally distinct group of users ever encountered another, hence highlighting the question of whether social media, in such contexts, facilitates the fl ow of information across social boundaries. This chapter addresses these questions via an analysis of language differences in social media communication focused on the Arab Spring and in doing so describes new methods for the analysis of large-scale Twitter data.