Marc Lynch, in
"Arabs Do Care About Gaza," looks at Arabic Twitter trends to assess recent events in Syria, Iraq, and Gaza:
What did Palestine’s relatively declining place in Arab discourse really
mean, though? For many analysts, especially in the West and Israel, it
signaled a nail in the coffin of theories of linkage and the relevance
of the Palestinian issue. For others, it was just a matter of the news
cycle, since Palestine hadn’t had the mass demonstrations on the Tahrir
Square model or the mass slaughter of Syria’s model . . .
Syria (in blue), which in 2012 and early 2013 consistently generated
millions of tweets per month in Arabic, shows a relatively low level
flat line. The shocking developments in Iraq (in green) galvanized
attention in mid-June, and Iraq continues to attract more attention now
than does Syria. But Gaza, after being virtually ignored for a long
time, surges to dominate everything else once the conflict begins. Score
one for the “latent relevance” hypothesis.
UPDATE: it's been pointed out that the table doesn't use the more frequent Arabic spelling of Syria as سوريا
, though a search with that spelling doesn't dramatically change the conclusion.
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