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" Weaponization of Twitter: Case of Gatari Blockade "
Alli, Asama
Jones, Marc Owen
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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1051262
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TL50379
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Alli, Asama
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| Title & Author
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Weaponization of Twitter: Case of Gatari Blockade\ Alli, AsamaJones, Marc Owen
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| College
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Hamad Bin Khalifa University (Qatar)
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| Date
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2019
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M.A.
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2019
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| Note
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92 p.
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| Abstract
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It was summer of 2017 when a political dispute began to foster in the Gulf, in which several members of the Gulf Cooperation Council were involved (Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, 2017). The political dispute, which later transitioned into a political confrontation, was accompanied by a multi-channel sustained media onslaught that depicted Qatar as a source of destabilization in the region. The media onslaught reached a crescendo when Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt, colloquially referred to the quartet states, announced severing diplomatic ties with Qatar along with other measurements tied to this end. At the heart of the media, onslaught is Twitter, which was and is still of crucial importance to the crisis. This study assesses the use of Twitter in framing propaganda against Qatar and observes the rise of antagonistic rhetoric on the social media platform. Through both meta-analysis and thematic analysis of hashtags, this study documents the amount of anti-Qatar hashtags on Twitter trends which were part of the overall disinformation campaign against Qatar. The thematic analysis of hashtags revealed that 37% of the hashtags demonized Qatar, covering a wide array of topics that were proved to be fabricated. One distinguishing feature of the media onslaught is the discussion of the Saudi-Qatari border closure on Twitter, a month prior to the decision was made. This asserts that Twitter laid the grounds for imposing a blockade on Qatar, as it helped in creating a pretext for it. However, as later sections of the study explore, counter-claims were made, where users showed sympathy to Qatar, affirming that it has been a victim of propaganda campaign that aims at discrediting it both regionally and internationally.
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Middle Eastern Studies
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Multimedia Communications
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Web Studies
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Jones, Marc Owen
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Hamad Bin Khalifa University (Qatar)
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