Online social media in the Syria conflict: Encompassing the extremes and the in-betweens

Derek O'Callaghan, Nico Prucha, Derek Greene, Maura Conway, Joe Carthy, Padraig Cunningham
2014 2014 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2014)  
The Syria conflict has been described as the most socially mediated in history, with online social media playing a particularly important role. At the same time, the everchanging landscape of the conflict leads to difficulties in applying analytical approaches taken by other studies of online political activism. Therefore, in this paper, we use an approach that does not require strong prior assumptions or the proposal of an advance hypothesis to analyze Twitter and YouTube activity of a range
more » ... protagonists to the conflict, in an attempt to reveal additional insights into the relationships between them. By means of a network representation that combines multiple data views, we uncover communities of accounts falling into four categories that broadly reflect the situation on the ground in Syria. A detailed analysis of selected communities within the antiregime categories is provided, focusing on their central actors, preferred online platforms, and activity surrounding "real world" events. Our findings indicate that social media activity in Syria is considerably more convoluted than reported in many other studies of online political activism, suggesting that alternative analytical approaches can play an important role in this type of scenario. 1
doi:10.1109/asonam.2014.6921619 dblp:conf/asunam/OCallaghanPGCCC14 fatcat:sjcumu6g3va3viuh5q4nhjodqi