It has since been eleven years the rise of “Arab Spring”: a series anti-government uprisings that spread across Arab world, ultimately leading to regime changes in several countries including Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Using social media other digital platforms communicate strategize, pro-democracy activists demanded increased transparency freedom from their long-serving leaders. This special is...

The article focuses on the situation of Shiites in Bahrain after events “Arab Spring” 2011. make up majority population this country, but continue to be oppressed by ruling Sunni dynasty al-Khalifa Kingdom. Shia political and spiritual leaders are being prosecuted.

This study examines the role of online social network proximity in cross-national diffusion of offline protests. Drawn upon Valente’s (1995) network diffusion model, the study operationalizes social network proximity-based protest exposure, using the international Facebook friendship share data. One year-long onsite protests during Arab Spring 2011 are examined using event history modeling. The...

The pervasive presence of the internet and the commonality of mobile devices for communication technology have changed modalities for information exchange. Recent developments in information and communication technology (ICT) have specific implications regarding dissemination of information among youth, as exemplified by the Arab spring. The opportunity of those emerging technologies should be ...

We describe a new methodology to infer sentiments held towards identities and behaviors from social events that we extract from a large corpus of newspaper text. Our approach draws on Affect Control Theory, a mathematical model of how sentiment is encoded in social events and culturally-shared views towards identities and behaviors. While most sentiment analysis approaches evaluate concepts on ...

The Spring 2013 issue of Global Media Journal American edition focuses on the rapid changes occurring in the "Arab World." In the midst of rapid social and governmental change, as well as the rise and fall of political regimes, personal and social media seem to stay at the forefront. During the initial period of revolution in Egypt, the Mubarak government tried to "turn the internet off." Rathe...