Twittering the #Arabspring? an Empirical Content Analysis of Tweets

This study examines tweet content from key periods of the uprisings in Egypt and Syria of 2011 and 2012, generally known as the Arab Spring . Some authors and the mainstream media have suggested that these uprisings were significantly influenced and organised by Twitter and subsequently referred to them as Twitter Revolution . Other authors have strongly opposed this idea and attributed it to self-deception in the light of marvellous inventions of the Western World. They have suggested Twitter was predominantly used as an information-sharing network. In an effort to contribute data to this debate, this study analyses tweet content from three different observation periods; two tweet datasets were collected from other academics and a third one was crawled from the Twitter API; this process made use of the crawling tool cURL and the database software mongoDB.§The combined tweet dataset contained about 1.9 million tweets out of which a sample of 1945 tweets was drawn. This sample was then evaluated in a quantitative content analysis according to a coding manual. These codes were entered into the statistical analysis software SPSS, in which they were also processed.