Framing a murder: Twitter influencers and the Jamal Khashoggi incident

Abrahams, Alexei; Leber, Andrew

doi:10.1080/13629395.2019.1697089

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Substantial coverage of the Middle East in U.S. news outlets also focuses on human rights issues. Saudi Arabia, especially, receives attention in U.S. media for cases such as Jamal Khashoggi's assassination (Abrahams and Leber, 2021) and reprisals against political and social activists (Elyas and Aljabri, 2020). Although U.S. coverage of Qatar increased in the lead up to the 2022 World Cup, in 2020 coverage of the country was reduced, while news coverage of UAE was also not particularly routine.…”

Section: The Halo Effectmentioning

confidence: 99%

A “regional halo effect”: Media use and evaluations of America's strategic relationships with five Middle East countries

Martin

Alkazemi

Sharma

2023

International Communication Gazette

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Countries in the Middle East go to considerable lengths using mass media to try to maintain or improve their images among the U.S. public. The same countries often engage in negative media campaigns in the U.S. against each other, attempting to bring down public support for regional rivals. This study examined diplomatic evaluations of five Middle East countries—rating Saudi Arabia, Israel, Palestine, Qatar, and UAE as an ally, neutral, or enemy of the U.S.—among a large, representative sample of U.S. adults ( N = 2059), and assessed measures of news use, social media use, political partisanship, and demographic variables as predictors of the evaluations. News use and other media use predicted little variance in diplomatic ratings; the strongest predictors of positive ratings of a given country were having rated one or more of the other countries positively also—what we term a “regional halo effect.” A key implication of this study is that attempting to harm public perceptions of a regional rival may be self-defeating for a given country, as negative attitudes toward the former country are associated with poor attitudes toward the latter.

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Section: The Halo Effectmentioning

confidence: 99%

A “regional halo effect”: Media use and evaluations of America's strategic relationships with five Middle East countries

Martin

Alkazemi

Sharma

2023

International Communication Gazette

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“…Abrahams and Leber conducted a very interesting study to analyze the Arabic Twitter hashtags following the murder of Khashoggi in October 2018 collecting more than 2.4 million tweets posted by 370,000 Twitter accounts! The study concluded that from this massive number of tweets on the subject ‘just 281 accounts drove 80% of the discourse, and that these accounts can be reliably clustered into separate ideological camps representing different social forces of Egyptian, Turkish, European, and Gulf origin, arrayed against or in support of Saudi Arabia's regional agenda’ (2021: 247). They continue that those two camps are quite identifiable in these Twitter fights: the defensive camp and the critical camp.…”

Section: Online Platforms: Between Advocacy and Censorshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Dominated by important Saudi influencers, ‘the “Defensive” camp… [who] accounted for over 85% of influencer traffic. A single account, @monther72, drove nearly 8% of all 2.4 million tweets, garnering more than 200,000 retweets during the time period’ (Abrahams and Leber, 2021: 252). On the other hand, the ‘critical camp’ was led by major Qatari influencers that created over 35% of tweets and retweets (Abrahams and Leber, 2021: 253).…”

Section: Online Platforms: Between Advocacy and Censorshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Dissident: ‘Sawing’ political activism by media corporation?

Dakroury

2022

International Communication Gazette

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Premiered in 2020, and although representing a grim story to narrate the Khashoggi story – a Saudi prominent journalist – who was ambushed, killed, and his body dismembered in his own country's consulate, The Dissident is more than simply a documentary. It is arguably a narration of the need for freedom of expression and political reform in the Arab world generally and Saudi Arabia in particular. This paper highlights the struggle to disseminate The Dissident documentary publicly as none of the major media corporation streamers (HBO, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple) offered to carry it. The way giant media corporations treat the information in this case not only as a commodity but as a means to avoid political tensions affecting their revenues in the markets. The article addresses this case study from a freedom of expression and the right to communicate perspective arguing for the need of an actual media reform within the middle east media system so journalists, like Khashoggi.

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“…An analysis of the Washington Post (in English) and Al Jazeera (in Arabic) showed that the news outlets politicized the issue and shifted their reporting style from objective coverage to murder accusations toward Saudi Arabia (AlMomani and Atiyyat, 2020). On Twitter, a polarized public debate flared up between regional coalitions of activists and Egyptian members of the Muslim Brotherhood exiled in Turkey who opposed Saudi Arabia's leadership against a group of mostly Saudi accounts and media outlets who defended the Kingdom (Abrahams and Leber, 2021). The public discourse on social media in the days following the murder revolved largely around the then-trending Arabic hashtag ‫.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

جمال_خاشقجي# #JamalKhashoggi: Unraveling multilingual Twitter sentiment dynamics in a longitudinal comparative analysis of tweets in Arabic and English

Zeid

Frissen

Scherr

2022

New Media & Society

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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.

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Framing a murder: Twitter influencers and the Jamal Khashoggi incident

Cited by 9 publications

References 10 publications

A “regional halo effect”: Media use and evaluations of America's strategic relationships with five Middle East countries

A “regional halo effect”: Media use and evaluations of America's strategic relationships with five Middle East countries

The Dissident: ‘Sawing’ political activism by media corporation?

جمال_خاشقجي# #JamalKhashoggi: Unraveling multilingual Twitter sentiment dynamics in a longitudinal comparative analysis of tweets in Arabic and English

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