|
Abstract:
|
Political leaders and activists use social media to reach broad audiences and send signals to their allies and foes. Various media outlets were employed extensively during the Arab Spring, by Saudi Arabia in response to changing policies in the U.S., and by various political and religious leaders in response to ISIS terrorist attacks. Despite the prevalence of outlets, and previous research on the critical impact of media and perceptions expressed by political leadership on civil unrest, we lack a comprehensive quantitative analysis of the attitudes of Arab political and religious leaders. This paper utilizes a novel algorithm that quantifies the attitudes of Arab leaders in social media and assesses the related political network structures. Such a measure of political perception allows enhanced analysis of the connection between terrorist events and Arab leaders' attitudes. The project provides a novel comprehensive approach to modeling of factions and conflict by bridging language processing, terrorism studies, social behavior, statistics, and computer science. The results have implications for the studies of terrorist events, political rhetoric, network analysis, and others.
|
