Content Analysis of the Main Twitter Accounts of Saudi Universities

Abstract

With unemployment amongst graduates in Saudi Arabia, social media platforms especially Twitter play a big part in communication. However, do universities utilise Twitter enough when engaging with employers and the community? This study analyses the post content in the main Twitter accounts of 13 private universities and 20 public universities in Saudi Arabia. Automated data extraction via Twitter API was used to gather the data. From the extracted tweets, 350 tweets were selected from private university accounts and 400 tweets from public university accounts to code for content analysis. The post content from both university types was informative and there was no presence of opinions. The most popular category of content for private universities was university events whereas for public universities it was general advertisements. References to employer engagement were more present in private university tweets compared to public university tweets. The study did highlight that more material needs to be posted relating to knowledge and technology transfer.

Confronting Current Crises and Critical Challenges of Climate Change

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The fetish economy of sex and gender activism: transnational appropriation and allyship

“…Saudi youth make up approximately two thirds of the national population (Murphy, 2011), and access to the outside world was facilitated by the controversial introduction of television satellite channels in the 1980s, followed by the late 1990s Internet boom (Yamani, 2000). The availability of such technologies has exposed Saudis to global politics, and the development of social media platforms in English and Arabic, particularly on individually controlled mobile phones, has facilitated social and political engagement across deeply entrenched cultural norms of gender segregation and political limitations on freedom of expression (Sreberny, 2015: 357–360).…”

“…Partial anonymity on Twitter and other social media platforms allows a freedom of speech not possible beyond the cyber sphere. At the same time, Twitter has been used by the regime to monitor dissent, identify regime critics (Nakashima and Bensinger, 2019) and influence global public opinion (Paul, 2019), though Annabelle Sreberny reports that many activists ‘are digital adepts and have learned to use TOR software and fake online profiles for online anonymity and filter-breakers to circumvent state monitoring’ (2015: 360). This context shaped the viral circulation of the ‘I Am My Own Guardian’ campaign in 2016.…”

“…Thus as activism travels transnationally, the work of activists on the ground is effaced and appropriated to Western political projects and civilisational discourse. Local antifeminists then seize the opportunity to discredit local activists and claim that their projects are inherently Orientalist (Charrad, 2011: 431) or that they are being manipulated by external political forces (Sreberny, 2015: 358). Indeed, Terman (2016) argues that even international feminist scholars have ended up levelling the same critique against local activists by privileging their critique of Western imperialism over activist agendas.…”