Twitter accounts ‘useful to study tension in society’

By Joseph Varghese/Staff ReporterTwo researchers from Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) have come out with the finding that the hashtag usage can serve as a “barometer” for tension in society. Hashtags are the Twitter accounts of people with their username stating with #. The researchers had analysed various hashtags used by the ruling and opposing groups in Egypt to study the pattern. Dr Ingmar Weber, senior scientist in QCRI’s social computing team, and Kiran Garimella, research associate at QCRI, used powerful computers to crunch through 17mn-odd tweets that had been dispatched by 7,000 Egyptians, on both sides of the political groups this year until June.Speaking to Gulf Times, Dr Weber said that if governments realise that society is drifting apart, they might think of positive countermeasures. He explained: “Typically, political science is dominated by looking at institutional players. For example, what does “The White House” want, what are “Saudi Arabia’s” interests and so on. Social media not only creates the opportunity to involve more people in political discussions, but also to bring political analysis closer to the grassroots level.”The analysis was done using a methodology developed by data scientists who track political polarisation in America. The aim of the study was to see whether groups are retreating into intellectual isolation in their patterns of communication, or engaging in overlapping conversation threads.Public data from Twitter was downloaded for a list of 22 prominent and politically active Twitter users in Egypt and manually categorised as either “ruling” or “opposition”; users who retweeted these ‘seed’ users were then downloaded and used for the basis of the study. More detailed analysis was done on this group to determine characteristics such as gender, location, religion. The results of the study were thought-provoking. The research presents a demonstration of the Twitter hashtag usage in Egypt from the angle of Islamist versus secular polarisation. The demo not only provides insights about current events in Egypt, but also reveals differences in attitudes of the two political camps with respect to major events abroad.After graphing the polarity value on a timeline chart, it was shown that the periods of increasing political polarisation measured on Twitter preceded outbreaks of violence. The result determined is that hashtag usage can serve as a barometer for tension in society. The researchers emphasised that they had been careful not to draw conclusions about causal connections and restricted themselves to observing correlations. Social media has been a widely used communication medium since the early days of the Arab Spring to galvanise support for the different political and social groups, and prominent voices are widening their online presence to engage audiences and stimulate support. This work looks at the case of Egypt as a young democracy to study how tensions between opposing political camps materialise in social media.