Social Media Narratives on Conflict from Northern Syria (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Media, Contention, and Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa

Abstract

Syria’s civil war has featured high levels of violence against civilians, massive internal displacement, and unprecedented refugee over almost a decade. In this paper, we use social media data to capture how user generated content represent and make meanings of ongoing violence in contested areas of Syria even as the war shows signs of coming to an end. We analyze comparable datasets of public messages in Arabic from three popular social media platforms: Telegram, Twitter, and Facebook. Discussions of violence remain central even during a period where quotidian violence is unlikely to shift the conflict’s overarching trajectory. Our initial findings describe a distinct use for the respective platforms. Narratives on Telegram focus more directly on the violence’s day-to-day devastation, while on Twitter they center the conflict’s master cleavages, with foreign intervention and memories of the Syrian uprising’s early years more central. Understanding the differences in content across platforms in a war zone can be important for researchers and policymakers where social media present a disproportionate amount of available information on the ongoing conflict.

Authors

• Fotini Christia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Ahmet Akbiyik, Harvard University

• Erin Elizabeth Walk, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• ELIZABETH Parker-Magyar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Kiran Kiran Garimella