Tweeting Beyond Tahrir: Ideological Diversity and Political Intolerance in Egyptian Twitter Networks∗

How do online social networks affect political tolerance in the highly polarized climate of post-coup Egypt? Taking advantage of the real-time networked structure of Twitter data, we find that greater network diversity is not only associated with lower levels of intolerance, but that spending an additional year in a diverse network results in a significant decrease in the use of intolerant rhetoric in the following six month period. By confronting some of the endogeneity concerns that arise in observational tolerance studies, and assessing the effect of both elite and non-elite network diversity on intolerance over time, this paper represents a valuable contribution to the literature. More substantively, this study enriches the ongoing debate over the effect of online social networks on political attitudes and behavior by providing key insights from a repressive environment where political violence and radicalization are on the