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Bursting the bubbles of the Arab Spring: the brokers who bridge ideology on Twitter

Online activism has become increasingly visible, with social media platforms being used to express protest and dissent from the Arab Spring to #MeToo. Scholarly interest in online activism has grown with its use, together with disagreement about its impact. Do social media really challenge traditional politics? Some claim that social media have had a profound and positive effect on modern protest — the speed of information sharing making online networks highly effective in building revolutionary movements. Others argue that this activity is merely symbolic: online activism has little or no impact, dilutes offline activism, and weakens social movements. Given online activity doesn’t involve the degree of risk, trust, or effort required on the ground, they argue that it can’t be considered to be “real” activism. In this view, the Arab Spring wasn’t simply a series of “Twitter revolutions”.

Despite much work on offline social movements and coalition building, few studies have used social network analysis to examine the influence of brokers of online activists (i.e. those who act as a bridge between different ideological groups), or their role in information diffusion across a network. In her Policy & Internet article “Brokerage Roles and Strategic Positions in Twitter Networks of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution”, Deena Abul-Fottouh tests whether social movements theory of networks and coalition building — developed to explain brokerage roles in offline networks, between established parties and organisations — can also be used to explain what happens online.

Social movements theory suggests that actors who occupy an intermediary structural position between different ideological groups are more influential than those embedded only in their own faction. That is, the “bridging ties” that link across political ideologies have a greater impact on mobilization than the bonding ties within a faction. Indeed, examining the Egyptian revolution and ensuing crisis, Deena finds that these online brokers were more evident during the first phase of movement solidarity between liberals, islamists, and socialists than in the period of schism and crisis (2011-2014) that followed the initial protests. However, she also found that the online brokers didn’t match the brokers on the ground: they played different roles, complementing rather than mirroring each other in advancing the revolutionary movement.

We caught up with Deena to discuss her findings:

Ed: Firstly: is the “Arab Spring” a useful term? Does it help to think of the events that took place across parts of the Middle East and North Africa under this umbrella term — which I suppose implies some common cause or mechanism?

Deena: Well, I believe it’s useful to an extent. It helps describe some positive common features that existed in the region such as dissatisfaction with the existing regimes, a dissatisfaction that was transformed from the domain of advocacy to the domain of high-risk activism, a common feeling among the people that they can make a difference, even though it did not last long, and the evidence that there are young people in the region who are willing to sacrifice for their freedom. On the other hand, structural forces in the region such as the power of deep states and the forces of counter-revolution were capable of halting this Arab Spring before it burgeoned or bore fruit, so may be the term “Spring” is no longer relevant.

Ed: Revolutions have been happening for centuries, i.e. they obviously don’t need Twitter or Facebook to happen. How significant do you think social media were in this case, either in sparking or sustaining the protests? And how useful are these new social media data as a means to examine the mechanisms of protest?

Deena: Social media platforms have proven to be useful in facilitating protests such as by sharing information in a speedy manner and on a broad range across borders. People in Egypt and other places in the region were influenced by Tunisia, and protest tactics were shared online. In other words, social media platforms definitely facilitate diffusion of protests. They are also hubs to create a common identity and culture among activists, which is crucial for the success of social movements. I also believe that social media present activists with various ways to circumvent policing of activism (e.g. using pseudonyms to hide the identity of the activists, sharing information about places to avoid in times of protests, many platforms offer the possibility for activists to form closed groups where they have high privacy to discuss non-public matters, etc.).

However, social media ties are weak ties. These platforms are not necessarily efficient in building the trust needed to bond social movements, especially in times of schism and at the level of high-risk activism. That is why, as I discuss in my article, we can see that the type of brokerage that is formed online is brokerage that is built on weak ties, not necessarily the same as offline brokerage that usually requires high trust.

Ed: It’s interesting that you could detect bridging between groups. Given schism seems to be fairly standard in society (Cf filter bubbles etc.) .. has enough attention been paid to this process of temporary shifting alignments, to advance a common cause? And are these incidental, or intentional acts of brokerage?

Deena: I believe further studies need to be made on the concepts of solidarity, schism and brokerage within social movements both online and offline. Little attention has been given to how movements come together or break apart online. The Egyptian revolution is a rich case to study these concepts as the many changes that happened in the path of the revolution in its first five years and the intervention of different forces have led to multiple shifts of alliances that deserve study. Acts of brokerage do not necessarily have to be intentional. In social movements studies, researchers have studied incidental acts that could eventually lead to formation of alliances, such as considering co-members of various social movements organizations as brokers between these organizations.

I believe that the same happens online. Brokerage could start with incidental acts such as activists following each other on Twitter for example, which could develop into stronger ties through mentioning each other. This could also build up to coordinating activities online and offline. In the case of the Egyptian revolution, many activists who met in protests on the ground were also friends online. The same happened in Moldova where activists coordinated tactics online and met on the ground. Thus, incidental acts that start with following each other online could develop into intentional coordinated activism offline. I believe further qualitative interviews need to be conducted with activists to study how they coordinate between online and offline activism, as there are certain mechanisms that cannot be observed through just studying the public profiles of activists or their structural networks.

Ed: The “Arab Spring” has had a mixed outcome across the region — and is also now perhaps a bit forgotten in the West. There have been various network studies of the 2011 protests: but what about the time between visible protests .. isn’t that in a way more important? What would a social network study of the current situation in Egypt look like, do you think?

Deena: Yes, the in-between times of waves of protests are as important to study as the waves themselves as they reveal a lot about what could happen, and we usually study them retroactively after the big shocks happen. A social network of the current situation in Egypt would probably include many “isolates” and tiny “components”, if I would use social network analysis terms. This started showing in 2014 as the effects of schism in the movement. I believe this became aggravated over time as the military coup d’état got a stronger grip over the country, suppressing all opposition. Many activists are either detained or have left the country. A quick look at their online profiles does not reveal strong communication between them. Yet, this is what apparently shows from public profiles. One of the levers that social media platforms offer is the ability to create private or “closed” groups online.

I believe these groups might include rich data about activists’ communication. However, it is very difficult, almost impossible to study these groups, unless you are a member or they give you permission. In other words, there might be some sort of communication occurring between activists but at a level that researchers unfortunately cannot access. I think we might call it the “underground of online activism”, which I believe is potentially a very rich area of study.

Ed: A standard criticism of “Twitter network studies” is that they aren’t very rich — they may show who’s following whom, but not necessarily why, or with what effect. Have there been any larger, more detailed studies of the Arab Spring that take in all sides: networks, politics, ethnography, history — both online and offline?

Deena: To my knowledge, there haven’t been studies that have included all these aspects together. Yet there are many studies that covered each of them separately, especially the politics, ethnography, and history of the Arab Spring (see for example: Egypt’s Tahrir Revolution 2013, edited by D. Tschirgi, W. Kazziha and S. F. McMahon). Similarly, very few studies have tried to compare the online and offline repertoires (see for example: Weber, Garimella and Batayneh 2013, Abul-Fottouh and Fetner 2018). In my doctoral dissertation (2018 from McMaster University), I tried to include many of these elements.

Read the full article: Abul-Fottouh, D. (2018) Brokerage Roles and Strategic Positions in Twitter Networks of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Policy & Internet 10: 218-240. doi:10.1002/poi3.169

Deena Abul-Fottouh was talking to blog editor David Sutcliffe.

In a world of “connective action” — what makes an influential Twitter user?

A significant part of political deliberation now takes place on online forums and social networking sites, leading to the idea that collective action might be evolving into “connective action”. The new level of connectivity (particularly of social media) raises important questions about its role in the political process. but understanding important phenomena, such as social influence, social forces, and digital divides, requires analysis of very large social systems, which traditionally has been a challenging task in the social sciences.

In their Policy & Internet article “Understanding Popularity, Reputation, and Social Influence in the Twitter Society“, David Garcia, Pavlin Mavrodiev, Daniele Casati, and Frank Schweitzer examine popularity, reputation, and social influence on Twitter using network information on more than 40 million users. They integrate measurements of popularity, reputation, and social influence to evaluate what keeps users active, what makes them more popular, and what determines their influence in the network.

Popularity in the Twitter social network is often quantified as the number of followers of a user. That implies that it doesn’t matter why some user follows you, or how important she is, your popularity only measures the size of your audience. Reputation, on the other hand, is a more complicated concept associated with centrality. Being followed by a highly reputed user has a stronger effect on one’s reputation than being followed by someone with low reputation. Thus, the simple number of followers does not capture the recursive nature of reputation.

In their article, the authors examine the difference between popularity and reputation on the process of social influence. They find that there is a range of values in which the risk of a user becoming inactive grows with popularity and reputation. Popularity in Twitter resembles a proportional growth process that is faster in its strongly connected component, and that can be accelerated by reputation when users are already popular. They find that social influence on Twitter is mainly related to popularity rather than reputation, but that this growth of influence with popularity is sublinear. In sum, global network metrics are better predictors of inactivity and social influence, calling for analyses that go beyond local metrics like the number of followers.

We caught up with the authors to discuss their findings:

Ed.: Twitter is a convenient data source for political scientists, but they tend to get criticised for relying on something that represents only a tiny facet of political activity. But Twitter is presumably very useful as a way of uncovering more fundamental / generic patterns of networked human interaction?

David: Twitter as a data source to study human behaviour is both powerful and limited. Powerful because it allows us to quantify and analyze human behaviour at scales and resolutions that are simply impossible to reach with traditional methods, such as experiments or surveys. But also limited because not every aspect of human behaviour is captured by Twitter and using its data comes with significant methodological challenges, for example regarding sampling biases or platform changes. Our article is an example of an analysis of general patterns of popularity and influence that are captured by spreading information in Twitter, which only make sense beyond the limitations of Twitter when we frame the results with respect to theories that link our work to previous and future scientific knowledge in the social sciences.

Ed.: How often do theoretical models (i.e. describing the behaviour of a network in theory) get linked up with empirical studies (i.e. of a network like Twitter in practice) but also with qualitative studies of actual Twitter users? And is Twitter interesting enough in itself for anyone to attempt to develop an overall theoretico-empirico-qualitative theory about it?

David: The link between theoretical models and large-scale data analyses of social media is less frequent than we all wish. But the gap between disciplines seems to be narrowing in the last years, with more social scientists using online data sources and computer scientists referring better to theories and previous results in the social sciences. What seems to be quite undeveloped is an interface with qualitative methods, specially with large-scale analyses like ours.

Qualitative methods can provide what data science cannot: questions about important and relevant phenomena that then can be explained within a wider theory if validated against data. While this seems to me as a fertile ground for interdisciplinary research, I doubt that Twitter in particular should be the paragon of such combination of approaches. I advocate for starting research from the aspect of human behaviour that is the subject of study, and not from a particularly popular social media platform that happens to be used a lot today, but might not be the standard tomorrow.

Ed.: I guess I’ve see a lot of Twitter networks in my time, but not much in the way of directed networks, i.e. showing direction of flow of content (i.e. influence, basically) — or much in the way of a time element (i.e. turning static snapshots into dynamic networks). Is that fair, or am I missing something? I imagine it would be fun to see how (e.g.) fake news or political memes propagate through a network?

David: While Twitter provides amazing volumes of data, its programming interface is notorious for the absence of two key sources: the date when follower links are created and the precise path of retweets. The reason for the general picture of snapshots over time is that researchers cannot fully trace back the history of a follower network, they can only monitor it with certain frequency to overcome the fact that links do not have a date attached.

The generally missing picture of flows of information is because when looking up a retweet, we can see the original tweet that is being retweeted, but not if the retweet is of a retweet of a friend. This way, without special access to Twitter data or alternative sources, all information flows look like stars around the original tweet, rather than propagation trees through a social network that allow the precise analysis of fake news or memes.

Ed.: Given all the work on Twitter, how well-placed do you think social scientists would be to advise a political campaign on “how to create an influential network” beyond just the obvious (Tweet well and often, and maybe hire a load of bots). i.e. are there any “general rules” about communication structure that would be practically useful to campaigning organisations?

David: When we talk about influence on Twitter, we usually talk about rather superficial behaviour, such as retweeting content or clicking on a link. This should not be mistaken as a more substantial kind of influence, the kind that makes people change their opinion or go to vote. Evaluating the real impact of Twitter influence is a bottleneck for how much social scientists can advise a political campaign. I would say than rather than providing general rules that can be applied everywhere, social scientists and computer scientists can be much more useful when advising, tracking, and optimizing individual campaigns that take into account the details and idiosyncrasies of the people that might be influenced by the campaign.

Ed.: Random question: but where did “computational social science” emerge from – is it actually quite dependent on Twitter (and Wikipedia?), or are there other commonly-used datasets? And are computational social science, “big data analytics”, and (social) data science basically describing the same thing?

David: Tracing back the meaning and influence of “computational social science” could take a whole book! My impression is that the concept started few decades ago as a spin on “sociophysics”, where the term “computational” was used as in “computational model”, emphasizing a focus on social science away from toy model applications from physics. Then the influential Science article by David Lazer and colleagues in 2009 defined the term as the application of digital trace datasets to test theories from the social sciences, leaving the whole computational modelling outside the frame. In that case, “computational” was used more as it is used in “computational biology”, to refer to social science with increased power and speed thanks to computer-based technologies. Later it seems to have converged back into a combination of both the modelling and the data analysis trends, as in the “Manifesto of computational social science” by Rosaria Conte and colleagues in 2012, inspired by the fact that we need computational modelling techniques from complexity science to understand what we observe in the data.

The Twitter and Wikipedia dependence of the field is just a path dependency due to the ease and open access to those datasets, and a key turning point in the field is to be able to generalize beyond those “model organisms”, as Zeynep Tufekci calls them. One can observe these fads in the latest computer science conferences, with the rising ones being Reddit and Github, or when looking at earlier research that heavily used product reviews and blog datasets. Computational social science seems to be maturing as a field, make sense out of those datasets and not just telling cool data-driven stories about one website or another. Perhaps we are beyond the peak of inflated expectations of the hype curve and the best part is yet to come.

With respect to big data and social data science, it is easy to get lost in the field of buzzwords. Big data analytics only deals with the technologies necessary to process large volumes of data, which could come from any source including social networks but also telescopes, seismographs, and any kind of sensor. These kind of techniques are only sometimes necessary in computational social science, but are far from the core of topics of the field.

Social data science is closer, but puts a stronger emphasis on problem-solving rather than testing theories from the social sciences. When using “data science” we usually try to emphasize a predictive or explorative aspect, rather than the confirmatory or generative approach of computational social science. The emphasis on theory and modelling of computational social science is the key difference here, linking back to my earlier comment about the role of computational modelling and complexity science in the field.

Ed.: Finally, how successful do you think computational social scientists will be in identifying any underlying “social patterns” — i.e. would you agree that the Internet is a “Hadron Collider” for social science? Or is society fundamentally too chaotic and unpredictable?

David: As web scientists like to highlight, the Web (not the Internet, which is the technical infrastructure connecting computers) is the largest socio-technical artifact ever produced by humanity. Rather than as a Hadron Collider, which is a tool to make experiments, I would say that the Web can be the Hubble telescope of social science: it lets us observe human behaviour at an amazing scale and resolution, not only capturing big data but also, fast, long, deep, mixed, and weird data that we never imagined before.

While I doubt that we will be able to predict society in some sort of “psychohistory” manner, I think that the Web can help us to understand much more about ourselves, including our incentives, our feelings, and our health. That can be useful knowledge to make decisions in the future and to build a better world without the need to predict everything.

Read the full article: Garcia, D., Mavrodiev, P., Casati, D., and Schweitzer, F. (2017) Understanding Popularity, Reputation, and Social Influence in the Twitter Society. Policy & Internet 9 (3) doi:10.1002/poi3.151

David Garcia was talking to blog editor David Sutcliffe.

Don’t Shoot the Messenger! What part did social media play in 2016 US election?

Young activists gather at Lafayette Park, preparing for a march to the U.S. Capitol in protest at the presidential campaign of presumptive Republican nominee Donald J. Trump. By Stephen Melkisethian (Flickr). — Young activists gather at Lafayette Park in protest at the presidential campaign of presumptive Republican nominee Donald J. Trump. By Stephen Melkisethian (Flickr).

Commentators have been quick to ‘blame social media’ for ‘ruining’ the 2016 election in putting Mr Donald Trump in the White House. Just as was the case in the campaign for Brexit, people argue that social media has driven us to a ‘post-truth’ world of polarisation and echo chambers.

Is this really the case? At first glance, the ingredients of the Trump victory — as for Brexit — seem remarkably traditional. The Trump campaign spent more on physical souvenirs than on field data, more on Make America Great Again hats (made in China) than on polling. The Daily Mail characterisation of judges as Enemies of the People after their ruling that the triggering of Article 50 must be discussed in parliament seemed reminiscent of the 1930s. Likewise, US crowds chanting ‘Lock her up’, like lynch mobs, seemed like ghastly reminders of a pre-democratic era.

Clearly social media were a big part of the 2016 election, used heavily by the candidates themselves, and generating 8.8 billion posts, likes and commentson Facebook alone. Social media also make visible what in an earlier era could remain a country’s dark secret — hatred of women (through death and rape threats and trolling of female politicians in both the UK and US), and rampant racism.

This visibility, society’s new self-awareness, brings change to political behaviour. Social media provide social information about what other people are doing: viewing, following, liking, sharing, tweeting, joining, supporting and so on. This social information is the driver behind the political turbulence that characterises politics today. Those rustbelt Democrats feeling abandoned by the system saw on social media that they were not alone — that other people felt the same way, and that Trump was viable as a candidate. For a woman drawn towards the Trump agenda but feeling tentative, the hashtag #WomenForTrump could reassure her that there were like-minded people she could identify with. Decades of social science research shows information about the behaviour of others influences how groups behave and now it is driving the unpredictability of politics, bringing us Trump, Brexit, Corbyn, Sanders and unexpected political mobilisation across the world.

These are not echo chambers. As recent research shows, people are exposed to cross-cutting discourse on social media, across ever larger and more heterogeneous social networks. While the hypothetical #WomenForTrump tweeter or Facebook user will see like-minded behaviour, she will also see a peppering of social information showing people using opposing hashtags like #ImWithHer, or (post-election) #StillWithHer. It could be argued that a better example of an ‘echo chamber’ would be a regular Daily Mail reader or someone who only watched Fox News.

The mainstream media loved Trump: his controversial road-crash views sold their newspapers and advertising. Social media take us out of that world. They are relatively neutral in their stance on content, giving no particular priority to extreme or offensive views as on their platforms, the numbers are what matter.

Rather than seeing social media solely as the means by which Trump ensnared his presidential goal, we should appreciate how they can provide a wealth of valuable data to understand the anger and despair that the polls missed, and to analyse political behaviour and opinion in the times ahead. Social media can also shine the light of transparency on the workings of a Trump administration, as they did on his campaign. They will be critical for building networks of solidarity to confront the intolerance, sexism and racism stirred up during this bruising campaign. And social media will underpin any radical counter-movement that emerges in the coming years.

Helen Margetts is the author of Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action and thanks her co-authors Peter John, Scott Haleand Taha Yasseri.