Seminar Users in the Arabic Twitter Sphere

We introduce the notion of "seminar users", who are social media users engaged in propaganda in support of a political entity. We develop a framework that can identify such users with 84.4% precision and 76.1% recall. While our dataset is from the Arab region, omitting language-specific features has only a minor impact on classification performance, and thus, our approach could work for detecting seminar users in other parts of the world and in other languages. We further explored a controversial political topic to observe the prevalence and potential potency of such users. In our case study, we found that 25% of the users engaged in the topic are in fact seminar users and their tweets make nearly a third of the on-topic tweets. Moreover, they are often successful in affecting mainstream discourse with coordinated hashtag campaigns.Comment: to appear in SocInfo 201

Online Radicalism, When Online Surfing Leads to Suffering

The development of online media has long played big roles in the spreading of intolerance and radicalism, in some levels, the online media is also used as a media to spread propaganda and to conduct online recruitment. Data compiled by Gabriel Weimann shows that radical groups use online media seriously to spread their wings in influencing and asking people to joint their movement. In 1998, radical-terrorist groups only had 12 sites, while in 2003 they had 2.650 sites. The number increased so high in 2014 where these groups are known to have more than 9.800 sites. The shifting place, from offline to online, used by radical groups to conduct their activities impacts to the targets they aim; online radicalism targets youth to become ‘jihadis’. A national survey conducted by Wahid Foundation on potency of intolerance and radicalism in Rohis (an after-school program focused on Islamic spirituality) shows this fact; 33% Rohis put terrorist suspect like Amrozi, Imam Samudra, Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, and Bahrun Na’im as the living example of Muslim practicing the real jihad. 37% believes that Osama bin Laden died syahid, 6% of them even support international terrorist group, ISIS. The article is designed to analyze how radical groups use online media to radicalize youth, as well as supporting factors surrounding the live of youth, especially in big cities of Indonesia

A local lens on global media literacy: Teaching media and the Arab world

The globalization and transnationalization of media use have facilitated access to voices from the Arab world. Students and teachers in Western higher education can make use of these voices within and outside the classroom to enhance students’ knowledge of the region and challenge Eurocentric imaginations of the ‘Other’. Yet to ensure students engage with these Arab sources in a meaningful way, media literacy is key. Drawing on and challenging a framework of global critical media literacy, this article argues that media literacy is grounded in time and space, meaning an effective teaching of global media literacy skills supposes an awareness of local media and power systems as well as communication cultures, and willingness to scrutinize one’s own Eurocentric positionalities. In this endeavor, this article proposes to teach global media literacy the local way, here, pertaining to the Arab world through three distinct media case studies: influencers; women’s activism; war and conflict

Integrating Diplomacy and Social Media: A Report of the First Annual Aspen Institute Dialogue on Diplomacy and Technology

This report is a result of the first annual Aspen Institute Dialogue on Diplomacy and Technology, or what we call ADDTech. The concept for this Dialogue originated with longtime communications executive and Aspen Institute Trustee Marc Nathanson. Since his tenure as Chairman of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), Nathanson has been concerned with how American diplomacy could more rapidly embrace the changing world of social media and other technologies. He is also a graduate of the University of Denver where former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's father, Josef Korbel, namesake of the Josef Korbel School of International Relations there, was his professor. Thus, Albright, another Institute Trustee, was a natural partner to create the first Dialogue on Diplomacy and Technology. The cast is ably supplemented with Korbel School Dean and former U.S. Ambassador Christopher Hill and Aspen Institute President Walter Isaacson, who himself was also recently the chair of the BBG.The topic for this inaugural dialogue is how the diplomatic realm could better utilize new communications technologies. The group focused particularly on social media, but needed to differentiate among the various diplomacies in play in the current world, viz., formal state diplomacy, public diplomacy, citizen diplomacy and business diplomacy. Each presents its own array of opportunities as well as problems. In this first Dialogue, much of the time necessarily had to be used to define our terms and learn how technologies are currently being used in each case. To help us in that endeavor, we focused on the Middle East. While the resulting recommendations are therefore rather modest, they set up the series of dialogues to come in the years ahead