No abstract

In 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who wrote for the Washington Post, was last seen alive entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Confirmed news of his murder ignited a heated and polarized public debate on Twitter. We use agenda melding as a theoretical lemma and argue that Twitter sentiment flourishes within multilingual, ad hoc public spheres contributing to an emotional agenda. We examined the Twitter sentiment from 2018 to 2021 by looking at the most popular hashtags used in both the Arabic-and-English language spheres. The daily sentiment analysis of 3,278,464 tweets revealed that both languages had a predominantly negative sentiment; however, the English sphere was more extreme in their emotional expression. An additional analysis of external media URLs found in a subsample of tweets highlighted distinct references to media discourse, emphasizing an East–West divide. Implications for global communication are discussed.