PEACEW RKS

BLOGS AND BULLETS III 

SYRIA’S SOCIALLY MEDIATED 

CIVIL WAR

Marc Lynch

Deen Freelon

Sean Aday

[ [
Cover photo: Sam Tarling/AFP/Getty Images

The views expressed in this report are those of 

the authors alone. They do not necessarily reflect 

the views of the United States Institute of Peace.

United States Institute of Peace

2301 Constitution Ave., NW

Washington, DC 20037

Phone: 202.457.1700

Fax: 202.429.6063

E-mail: usip_requests@usip.org

Web: www.usip.org

Peaceworks No. 91. First published 2014.

ISBN: 978-1-60127-204-1

© 2014 by the United States Institute of Peace

About the Report

In this report from the USIP PeaceTech Initiative, a team 

of scholars from George Washington University and 

American University analyze the role of social media in 

Syria’s civil war. The report focuses primarily on group 

dynamics, activist organizations’ use of online media, and 

the relationship between new and traditional media. It 

draws on a public conference held in Washington, D.C., 

in September 2012 with Syrian activists, Western journalists, and policy analysts, as well as on a private workshop 

held in April 2013 at Stanford University with academic 

researchers and leading research scientists from top 

technology firms. It presents novel empirical research 

on Twitter conversations about Syria that demonstrates 

important new findings about differences across 

Arabic and English users, and about the emergence of 

distinct, insular clusters of discourse. This report is part 

of the ongoing Blogs and Bullets project led by USIP’s 

PeaceTech Initiative, in partnership with George Washington University’s Institute for Public Diplomacy and 

Global Communication. It builds on two other reports, 

published in 2010 and 2012: “Blogs and Bullets: New 

Media in Contentious Politics” and “Blogs and Bullets II: 

New Media and Conflict After the Arab Spring.” 

About the Authors

Marc Lynch is a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University and director of the Institute for Middle East Studies. Deen Freelon 

is an assistant professor of communication at American 

University. Sean Aday is an associate professor of media 

and public affairs and international affairs at George 

Washington University and director of the Institute for 

Public Diplomacy and Global Communication.
PEACEWORKS • JANUARY 2014 • NO. 91

CONTENTS

Introduction . . . 5

Social Media and Syria’s War . . . 7

Activists, Citizen Journalists, and Competing Narratives ... . 8

Curation and Authentication ... . 10

Analysis and Policy Uses ... . 12

Syria on Twitter ... . 16

Most Retweeted Tweets ... . 22

Clusters ... . 24

Conclusion . . . 27

Recommendations . . . 30

[Syria’s has been the most socially mediated civil conflict 

in history. An exceptional amount of what the outside 

world knows—or thinks it knows—about Syria’s nearly 

three-year-old conflict has come from videos, analysis, and 

commentary circulated through social networks.]

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SYRIA’S SOCIALLY MEDIATED CIVIL WAR

Summary

■ Analysis of the unprecedented use of social media on Syria points to important ndings 

on the role of new media in conict zones. In particular, social media create a dangerous 

illusion of unmediated information ows.

■ Key curation hubs within networks may now play a gatekeeping role as powerful as that 

of television producers and newspaper editors.

■  e implications for policymakers driven by responsibility to protect concerns are serious.

■  e pattern in social media toward clustering into insular like-minded communities is 

unmistakable and has profound implications.

■ We need a more sophisticated understanding of structural bias in social media and the 

dicult challenges in activist curation. It is not enough to develop methods for authenticating particular videos or vetting specic claims.

■ Better ways of connecting online trends to real-world developments are critical.

■ Research focused on individual transformation, regime policies, group dynamics, collective 

action, and external attention will likely be more productive than broader questions about 

citizen journalism or the Internet’s eects on political conict.

■  e study of mainstream media’s use of social media content should be extended to include 

television and the distinct demands for broadcast footage.

■  e rapid growth in Arabic social media use poses serious problems for any research that 

draws only on English-language sources.

■ We need far better tools for sentiment analysis to speak with condence about the real 

political meaning of identied clusters and trends.

■ Findings also need to begin to link descriptive analytics in causal ways to behavior, attitudes, or political outcomes.  ese ndings need to be placed within the political process, 

and their specic eects measured on a variety of potential outcomes.

■  e appropriate response to these challenges is not to abandon social media evidence, were 

that even possible, but rather to develop systematic procedures to guard against predictable 

fallacies.

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Introduction

 e Obama administration’s push for military action against Syria in August 2013 began with 

videos and images circulated online depicting the horric aftermath of an alleged chemical 

weapons attack in East Ghouta. Few could forget the dening horror of the image of rows 

of dead children lined up on a stone oor.  is was hardly the rst time, however, that online 

visual media decisively shaped the course of the war. Shocking videos and pictures profoundly 

shaped the world’s understanding of the violent repression of peaceful protestors in the early 

days of the conict. Equally shocking videos, such as one of a rebel commander eating the lung 

of his enemy, helped sour international views of the opposition.

Syria’s has been the most socially mediated civil conict in history. Compared with others 

before it, an exceptional amount of what the outside world knows—or thinks it knows—about 

Syria’s nearly three-year-old conict has come from videos, analysis, and commentary circulated through social networks. Given the few journalists or international observers on the 

ground to oer external validity checks of claimed protests or massacres, the international 

audience needed to assess instead a torrential ow of online information.  ese materials have 

informed international relief eorts, assessments of the identity and character of the rebel 

ghting groups, and debates about international intervention. But how credible was such information? How was it produced? Why did some gain attention and others, equally intriguing, fade into obscurity? And how did such information actually ow through the rapidly 

changing online social media?

 e U.S. Institute of Peace and George Washington University Blogs and Bullets Initiative 

since 2010 has been grappling with many of these crucial questions.  e project began with 

two reports that laid a framework for disaggregating the potential eects of particular new 

media forms along multiple levels of analysis:1

 individual attitudes and attributes, group dynamics, mobilization and protest organization, mainstream media, and regime applications for 

surveillance or control.  is report focuses primarily on group dynamics, activist organizations’ 

use of online media, and the relationship between new and traditional media.

 e unprecedented use of social media in the Syrian conict, and the exceptional human and strategic urgency of that conict, made it an essential case for this ongoing research 

program.

 is report surveys some of the best of the remarkable number of creative and important 

eorts to exploit the vast quantities of information available about Syria online. Journalists, 

most obviously, have drawn heavily on these online videos and social media accounts to report 

on an exceptionally dicult and dangerous conict. Broadcast media have frequently used online videos in place of footage they could not produce on their own. Analysts inside and outside 

governments have also used online information to paint detailed accounts of everything from 

the factions of the Syrian insurgency to living conditions in Aleppo. Widely cited counts of 

the dead, wounded, and displaced have been constructed and veried in part through materials 

circulated online.  ese analytical eorts have set a new gold standard for the use of online and 

social media content to understand conict zones.

Several ndings from our survey of these eorts are especially important:

■ Social media create a dangerous illusion of unmediated information ows.  ose who follow YouTube videos, Syrian Twitter accounts, or Facebook postings may believe that they 

are receiving an accurate and comprehensive account of the conict. But these ows are 

carefully curated by networks of activists and designed to craft particular narratives. Indeed, 
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PEACEWORKS 91

key curation hubs within social media networks may now play a gatekeeping role as powerful as that once played by television producers and op-ed page editors. 

■ Mainstream media’s reliance on social media has dangers as well as benets. Journalists 

with limited access on the ground rely heavily on online activists for video and visual 

content, as well as for contacts to interview by Skype or satellite phone.  is reliance creates 

the real risk of the same partial, misleading, and motivated narrative in mass media as in 

social media. Although journalists and editors have developed sophisticated protocols for 

verication of particular videos, they have done much less to control for these deeper 

structural biases.

■  e circulation of violent images and videos online has multiple eects. It is perhaps surprising that the relentless ow of violent, horric images did not generate signicant public 

support for intervention in Syria.  e barrage had multiple potential eects. Activists 

hoped that it would galvanize international outrage, delegitimize the regime, bear witness, 

and document the atrocities for future war crimes justice.  e violence, though, could also 

contribute to extremism and polarization, undermining the eorts of nonviolent activists 

to adhere to a strategy of moral critique.  e violent videos could equally be demobilizing, 

in that Syrians and Arabs in other countries recoiled from the horrors that had been 

unleashed and sought instead to end the war by any means necessary. Videos of rebel 

atrocities and radical Islamist ghters, often circulated to win support in the Gulf, harmed 

the opposition’s cause in the West.

We go beyond this survey of existing research to present an empirical study of more than 

thirty-eight million tweets in English and Arabic about Syria over twenty-eight months. We 

use these data to explore and analyze the social and communicative networks that evolved over 

the course of the conict and have generated the following ndings:

■ Arabic-language tweets quickly came to dominate the online discourse. Early in the Arab 

Spring, English-language social media played a crucial role in transmitting the regional 

uprisings to a Western audience. By June 2011, Arabic had overtaken English as the 

dominant language, and social media increasingly focused inward on local and identitybased communities. Studies using English-only datasets can no longer be considered 

acceptable.

■  e English-language Twitter conversation about Syria is particularly insular and increasingly interacts only with itself, creating a badly skewed impression of the broader Arabic 

discourse. It focused on dierent topics, emphasized dierent themes, and circulated different imagery.  is has important implications for understanding mainstream media’s 

limitations in covering Syria and other non-Western foreign crises and raises troubling 

questions about the skewed image that coverage might be presenting to audiences. 

■ Some of the Syria-focused clusters grew more insular over time; others ebbed and owed 

in their engagement with others.  e pattern over time toward clustering into insular 

communities of the like-minded is unmistakable. It did not, as might be expected, take the 

form of polarization per se, but rather of the evolution of a complex web of multiple insular 

networks.  is has profound implications for how information owed and how dierent 

groups interacted.

Journalists with limited 

access on the ground rely 

heavily on online activists 

for video and visual 

content. This reliance 

creates the real risk of the 

same partial, misleading, 

and motivated narrative 

in mass media as in 

social media.
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SYRIA’S SOCIALLY MEDIATED CIVIL WAR

Social Media and Syria’s War

Syrian activists began trying to mobilize international and domestic support for protests 

against the regime of Bashar al-Assad even before the outbreak of serious mobilization in the 

middle of March 2011.  e uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt that transformed the Arab world 

in January 2011 also inspired Syrian activists, who drew on the same tools and methods used 

by other Arab activists across the region.  ey posted videos to YouTube, adopted similar slogans (“the people want to overthrow the regime”), created Twitter hashtags (#mar15), and attempted to portray an image of a rising nonviolent Syrian protest wave through online media.

Small protests in Damascus and elsewhere were lmed and uploaded to YouTube to create the 

impression of Arab Spring–style mobilization.  is impression did not necessarily reect the 

reality on the ground at the time, where protest remained dangerous and rare. However, it did 

set in place a number of key activist nodes and networks that would be pivotal in the coming 

months. It also established patterns of media reliance on activist-generated online content in 

the absence of journalists present on the ground.

 e Syrian regime originally felt condent that it would avoid such a challenge, owing to 

what it considered its greater legitimacy compared with the pro-Western governments under 

challenge in the region. It took no chances, however, particularly in light of the rapid move 

toward international intervention in Libya. It deployed signicant repressive force against even 

minor signs of protest activity.  is excessive response proved self-defeating when the arrest 

and abuse of youths in the southern town of Deraa over anti-Assad grati sparked local protests that rapidly spread.  eir abuse in prison sparked angry protests that also spread rapidly, 

amplied by an aggressive social media campaign designed to draw international attention 

to the abuses and the then peaceful protests. Although al-Jazeera and other Arabic television 

stations initially downplayed their coverage of the Syrian protests in favor of the Libyan war, 

within months they began to lavish attention on the growing challenge to Assad’s rule.

Social media and the Internet proved essential to the international coverage of Syria from 

the outset.  e nature of the Syrian regime and of the conict meant that very few journalists 

had direct access to the battleelds. In 2013, the Committee to Protect Journalists ranked Syria 

as “the most dangerous place in the world for journalists.”2 A handful of Western journalists 

gained access at various points, often at a high personal cost. Marie Colvin and Anthony 

Shadid were only the most famous to die while covering the conict, and freelancers such as 

the American Austin Tice have disappeared into the abyss. Later, more journalists began to 

visit rebel-controlled areas in northern Syria, but generally either under the careful guidance 

and control of rebel “handlers” intent on shaping a particular narrative or at the invitation of 

the Assad regime. Some journalists have done extraordinary work on the ground in dangerous conditions.  eir work, however, stands out precisely because few others have been able to 

duplicate their eorts.

Most television stations, including the pan-Arab stations, relied heavily on citizen journalists and online YouTube videos for footage to accompany their stories. Many no doubt believed 

that the video evidence in these social media could oer the opportunity to discover a ground 

truth that would have never been possible in the past. Many networks developed elaborate 

in-house shops to locate, authenticate, and curate video evidence, some (like al-Jazeera) going 

further and actively soliciting submissions.

Many journalists and Syrian activists believed that the Internet had radically changed the 

ability of the regime to carry out monstrous acts of violence.  e most frequent comparison 

Many networks 

developed elaborate inhouse shops to locate, 

authenticate, and curate 

video evidence.
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was with 1982, when Hafez al-Assad, father of current Syrian strongman Bashar, massacred 

thousands of alleged Muslim Brotherhood members in the city of Hama. Not only was the 

massacre mostly concealed from foreign journalists for a long time, but the regime was also 

able to prevent even Syrian citizens from knowing the truth. At a conference in October 2012, 

Syrian activist Rami Nakhla said that he had not learned the truth of the 1982 devastation of 

Hama for some twenty-ve years. In 2011, by contrast, Syrians and the world knew about 

the destruction of Homs in real time in exceedingly graphic detail. Whether this knowledge 

actually changed the outcomes remains very much in question, of course, given the limited attention to Syria or support for intervention in the West. 

As the months ground on and the body count grew, the balance within the opposition 

shifted relentlessly toward the armed groups. By the spring of 2012, Syria’s conict looked 

more like a civil war with external intervention on both sides than like the earlier peaceful uprising.  e August 2012 resignation of UN special envoy Ko Annan triggered a rapid cascade 

toward armed uprising.  e body count soared, as did the scale of devastation, the types of 

weaponry used, and the pace of displacement. As attacks on and kidnapping of journalists in 

rebel-controlled zones grew, journalists became even more wary of reporting from the ground. 

 is created very dierent incentives and roles for online activists and social media. 

If activists learned from the Arab Spring, the nascent Syrian armed opposition imitated the 

uses of the Internet by the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Armed groups recorded and 

disseminated videos of their campaigns and attacks for a variety of reasons.  ey used such videos to demonstrate their prowess relative to that of other armed groups, to strike fear into the 

hearts of their adversaries, and to attract nancial and political support from potential external 

backers.  e proliferation of competing groups with dierent interests drastically reduced the 

ability of a small cadre of activists to control the message or to curate the types of videos or 

information circulating outward.

4

 As had been the case among Iraqi resistance factions, various 

strands of a highly divided opposition used videos as part of their internecine battles even more 

vociferously than they did as a weapon against Assad.  is made it far more dicult for anyone 

to control the narrative.

5

Activists, Citizen Journalists, and Competing Narratives

 e sheer volume of videos, information, and discourse owing from Syria could in principle 

allow the outside world unmediated access to the conict in all its diversity. But in practice, the 

scale and nature of the information ows were overwhelming even to most specialists—to say 

nothing of the casual observer. Certain videos emerged from the cacophony to gain outsized 

visibility and impact: the shelling of Homs, the lung-eating rebel commander, and the bodies 

of the children killed by chemical weapons.  e proliferation of messages and groups complicated eorts to control the message, but groups of all description nonetheless tried extremely 

hard to serve as curators and gatekeepers.  eir eorts were helped in part by the growing 

insularity of online social networks described later in this report: Videos of Islamist calls for 

martyrdom that circulated heavily among Islamist online networks, for instance, might never 

be noticed by English-language journalists primarily attuned to secular activist networks. 

 e Syrian opposition worked hard to craft a narrative for the international media of a 

peaceful, pro-Western uprising, and the Syrian regime sought to portray their challengers as 

radical Islamists supported by nefarious outsiders, such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar.  e Syrian protest movement struggled to remain nonviolent in the face of a crushing, brutal regime 

The Syrian opposition 

worked hard to craft 

a narrative for the 

international media of a 

peaceful, pro-Western 

uprising, and the Syrian 

regime sought to 

portray their challengers 

as radical Islamists 

supported by nefarious 

outsiders.
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SYRIA’S SOCIALLY MEDIATED CIVIL WAR

response. Some elements of the notoriously divided Syrian opposition began lobbying for international military intervention against Assad early on, with demands ranging from arms to a 

no-y zone. Others rejected foreign military intervention and armed uprising, arguing instead 

for a principled nonviolent protest movement that would challenge Assad’s moral legitimacy.

 ose political battles were sometimes fought out through online arguments over the naming 

of protests or the choice of hashtags.

Activists based in Beirut, London, Turkey, and elsewhere played key roles in transmitting 

information from the ground to the broader world.  e Local Coordinating Committees 

(LCCs) collected videos and testimony in their areas and then uploaded or smuggled them 

out to other network nodes outside the country for broader dissemination. Facebook groups 

and websites, such as the Sham News Network, became primary sources of “credible” information.  e Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based organization with 

close ties to the opposition, became one of the most widely cited sources for information 

about deaths and atrocities in the country.  ese curation eorts succeeded in part because 

they circulated information in English and because they formed warm bonds of trust with 

sympathetic journalists.

Despite their growing reliance on their reports, journalists and analysts covering Syria generally understood the tension between these groups’ roles as citizen journalists reporting the 

truth and activists supporting a cause. Accounts of their eorts routinely framed them along 

lines such as “the revolutionaries and citizen-journalists in and around Syria hope their battle 

to spread information will save their fellow citizens from slaughter and prompt international 

intervention.”6

 Similarly, another story quoted an Aleppo activist as saying that “the regime 

prevented foreign journalists from coming in, and I needed to show the world that police 

were shooting dead peaceful protesters.”7  is model seemed unproblematic when the citizen 

journalists were reporting a relatively uncontested single narrative of regime attacks on peaceful protestors but would become far more problematic as the opposition fragmented and rising 

violence and extremism clouded the purity of the protest narrative.

Most early coverage of these online activists was celebratory and uncritical, presenting 

the Syrians producing and disseminating these videos in overwhelmingly approving terms.

Headlines such as “Syrian Citizen Journalists Risk All to Bring Stories from the Frontlines,”8

“Running Toward Danger, Syria’s Citizens Become Journalists,”9 “How Media-Savvy Activists Report from the Front Lines in Syria,”10 or “For Syrian Activists, YouTube Is a Sword and 

a Shield”11 hardly invited readers to consider the political agendas that might lie behind the 

selection and presentation of these videos.

But such agendas clearly did drive the calculations of which videos to highlight and circulate. Activists clearly saw the videos as an important weapon in the political and later military 

struggle. Citizen journalists certainly took risks to document a wide range of events, but only 

a select subset of those found wider distribution. “Activists on the ground and online don’t just 

happen to capture and record media because they’re in the right place at the right time. Instead, 

they systematically gather and strategically disseminate media.”12 Raf Jouejati, a spokesperson 

for the LCCs, acknowledged that “we send the major ones, not every one.”13 In October 2012, 

Syrian online activist Rami Nakhla recounted his eorts to destroy and suppress smuggled 

video of armed groups in Idlib: “I said, ‘Oh my God, no way.’ I deleted it immediately so that 

it will not get it online.”  e videos taken by another user did eventually appear on YouTube, 

but virtually nobody saw them because activists did not link to them or push them out through 

their networks. As Nakhl mentioned, “A huge part of this revolution is exposing Assad of 
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crimes and making sure the Assad regime is held accountable for those crimes . . . and for us to 

do that credibly we must issue credible information.”14

 e online activists did not have the virtual eld to themselves.  e Syrian regime joined 

the ght to shape the narrative by oering their own videos and spin, the Syrian Electronic 

Army—which launched hacking attacks against websites deemed hostile—being the most 

famous manifestation. Most of the ghting groups had an information strategy to accompany their physical battles, each appealing to dierent constituencies and oering dierent 

narratives.  e secular activists might craft a narrative of a moderate opposition to win over 

Western support, but at the same time an Islamist ghting group might, for instance, emphasize its Sala credentials and jihadist spirit to win nancial support from wealthy Kuwaiti 

and Saudi Islamist networks. As the importance of the online environment grew clear, erce 

battles emerged over the interpretation of videos. For instance, the enormous publicity granted 

to a rebel commander lmed eating the internal organs of a vanquished enemy badly hurt the 

opposition’s image abroad at a crucial moment when it desperately sought arms from abroad.

15

Some have argued that this heavy social mediation even contributed to the barbarism of 

the war. As Aryn Baker put it in a report for Time magazine, “ e ubiquity of camera phones 

and social media are enabling a mixture of propaganda, intimidation and boastful exhibitionism. In this, the rst YouTube war, videos have driven the conict even as they document its 

horrors.”16 Others counter that war has always given birth to horric atrocities, even if smartphones weren’t around to record them for posterity. As the veteran war correspondent Jon Lee 

Anderson poignantly put it, “It has always been thus, and let’s not anyone forget it.”17

Curation and Authentication

Perhaps ironically, in light of the importance of social media, curation and editorial choices 

became more rather than less important for the circulation of information about Syria.  e 

deluge of information made it dicult for even specialists, to say nothing of casual news consumers, to keep up or to evaluate the credibility and signicance of videos, images, or information circulating online. As Ali and Fahmy found in the coverage of the Arab Spring more 

broadly, editorial gatekeepers still ensure that “only a small portion of the abundant information on social networks is made available to the public through the mainstream forum.”18

Curation was not only in the hands of newspaper editors, however. Key online hubs such as 

Andy Carvin of NPR (@acarvin) and the UAE columnist Sultan al-Qassemi (@sultanalqassemi) directed attention for English-speaking audiences. For Arabic-speaking audiences, very 

dierent hubs such as al-Jazeera personalities Faisal al-Qassem (@kasimf) or Ali al-Dhari (@

alialdhari) provided comparable curation.  is curation is critical to understanding how inuence works in this networked environment: Individual hubs that might be little known to the 

wider public had massive inuence within discrete communities. Audiences tended instead to 

rely on a relatively small number of such individuals and news hubs to sort through, interpret, 

and synthesize the online materials. Such hubs played at least as important a role as the traditional newspaper or television editor in curating news. In the case of Syria, in particular, no assumption could be made about the independence or neutrality of these hubs: On the contrary, 

many if not most were openly activist on one side or the other, and others either consciously or 

unconsciously inclined toward one side’s narrative and tended to privilege such materials while 

ignoring or skeptically reporting the other’s.

YouTube took on a far more important role in Syria than in other recent cases, posing 

unique challenges and opportunities to researchers.  e mainstream media relied heavily on 

The deluge of information 

made it difficult for 

even specialists, to say 

nothing of casual news 

consumers, to keep up or 

to evaluate the credibility 

and significance of videos, 

images, or information 

circulating online.
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SYRIA’S SOCIALLY MEDIATED CIVIL WAR

these videos.

19 Few could aord not to use such sources, whatever reservations they may have 

had, given the intense diculty of getting journalists into Syria and the need for striking imagery. A study by the Annenberg School for Communication of Syria coverage by the BBC 

and al-Jazeera found vague citations such as “from YouTube” or “from the Internet,” with few 

specics.

20 In Egypt, a legion of foreign correspondents were present to document the protests, 

while al-Jazeera’s unblinking eye on Tahrir provided ready-made visuals. In Syria, however, 

YouTube became the primary source of video content for television, websites, and analysts.

One of the best examples is the New York Times’ Watching Syria’s War, which tracks the human 

cost of the conict through videos on this site.

21  is had both positive and more ambiguous 

eects, because audiences tended to assume that the YouTube-mediated visibility accurately 

portrayed the reality on the ground.  is accuracy cannot be assumed, however.

22

Online videos and other social media–generated information is still ltered through the 

news norms that govern how traditional media decide what is, or isn’t, newsworthy. Many 

studies over the decades have pointed out how mainstream media’s need for fresh storylines 

can lead journalists to misrepresent stories, especially ones that stay in the news for extended 

periods. “I think that there’s a real divide between what’s urgent and what’s important,” said 

ABC’s Lara Setrakian. “We do tend toward what is urgent for the news. And then that comes 

at the expense of what’s important.” Deb Amos similarly noted that the length of the conict 

has made it dicult to maintain interest without novel stories or images: “I’m nding now it is 

harder to keep my editors interested in continuing with the Syrian coverage. I can’t just go . . .

myself down somewhere and wait for Hama or Homs or a peaceful demonstration.”23

Similarly, Robert Mackey of the New York Times, who writes the paper’s online blog e 

Lede, which has curated online videos and other social media from the Syrian conict since it 

began, said that early in the uprising a protest with a few dozen people would be news. Now, 

however, protest itself is largely uninteresting to journalists and, he argued, audiences, unless 

it has huge numbers of participants. Audience expectations, he asserted, mattered to editorial 

selection: “You could have tens of thousands of people demonstrating and we feel like we’ve 

seen it before so is it really news or not?” Indeed, the combination of politically motivated 

curation of online videos and other media with traditional media’s reliance on news norms 

that eschew complexity in favor of easy black-and-white narratives can produce highly misleading information for news audiences.  is combination, coupled with traditional media’s 

well-documented bias toward violence and sensationalism, can lead to the eventual devaluing 

of storylines about peaceful protest. In Syria, for instance, Global Voices Online editor Ivan Sigal 

pointed out that a large segment of society is still agitating for peaceful routes to change and 

rejecting the rebel groups’ adoption of often brutally violent, military-based strategy. But such 

groups found no place in the dominant media narratives and generally didn’t produce the kinds 

of compelling videos attractive to media outlets.

 e mainstream media’s storyline also shifted when they nally got secure access inside 

Syria from Turkey in early 2012. Before that, they mostly relied on activist groups to smuggle 

out video of massacres and battles, raising important verication challenges. When journalists were able to get into some parts of the country safely, they were able to verify information 

rsthand. Yet at the same time, new challenges arose. For instance, typically they were provided 

access by rebel groups, raising questions of manipulation similar to when reporters were embedded with coalition forces in the Iraq War.

As Amos pointed out, however, access also changed the story from what journalists saw 

online to what they saw with their own eyes, sometimes to the exclusion of important stories 
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happening elsewhere. Horrible things are still happening in Homs, for instance, and video is 

being produced documenting those atrocities. But, she said, the tendency of journalists is to 

ignore that in favor of the stories they can witness. “We have the same volume of video coming out of Hama and Homs, Homs in particular,” noted Amos. “And the same destruction in 

Homs but nobody covers it. It really doesn’t show up in any of the mainstream media at all.  e 

arc of the story now is the militarization of the revolution and the ability of journalists to cross 

the border in the north, and relatively safely.” 

Authentication and verication became increasingly important as the battle over the narrative accelerated.

24 Activists defended their practices: “When the regime began denouncing the 

activist videos as fakes, the LCC started to make sure the people narrating the videos would 

say the name of the city and the time it was taken. . . .  e activists have been trained to avoid 

exaggeration, capture the leader of a demonstration when taping a video and show recognizable landmarks.”25 In March 2012, however, the credibility of the videos became a major issue 

when an activist was caught embellishing video evidence.

26 Such incidents were particularly 

problematic for the preferred narratives about the role of the videos as the “truth” juxtaposed 

to regime lies.

27 If the videos and other information produced by the opposition were simply 

another form of deception, such claims would become harder to sustain.

 e problem, then, for mainstream journalists and news organizations is twofold. First, as 

both anti- and pro-regime interests become more savvy, verication becomes more dicult.

 is isn’t just about fake videos (such as staged torture) but also about examples such as that 

cited, when the video is of a real protest but activists have learned to edit out or avoid making 

sectarian statements for rhetorical purposes. Second, the media’s well-established bias toward 

violence and conict at the expense of peaceful protest and diplomacy creates both an incentive for groups to produce (or manipulate) videos with this content and potentially a distorted 

view of the conict.

28  ese factors combine to threaten news organizations’ credibility, despite 

the dogged eorts by most to verify and oer disclaimers to audiences about the limits of their 

ability to vouch for the veracity of the content. Even these caveats, however, can threaten journalists’ credibility if they become a crutch by which news organizations prop up stories based 

on potentially misleading or even false information and imagery.

Analysis and Policy Uses

Journalists are not alone in nding creative ways to exploit the new forms of online content.

Indeed, the innovative uses of such material by policy analysts have set new standards that will 

almost certainly become standard practice in all future conict zones.  us far, the primary use 

of the Internet by researchers has been to search online sources to extract otherwise unknown 

information about the conict.  ese eorts range from the very simple (watching YouTube 

videos for evidence of jihadist involvement or foreign weapons) to the more complex (estimating deaths and casualties).

 e exploitation of the source material can be more or less exhaustive, context-sensitive, 

and interpretively sound. Analysts who spend countless hours watching videos of combat from 

the Syrian front lines will notice when new types of weaponry suddenly appear and will appreciate the signicance in ways which no mechanized online search tool could match. But 

even the best analysts are captives to the online availability of the relevant data:  e best study 

of Free Syria Army battalion formation based on YouTube videos tells you nothing about the 

battalions that they do not announce themselves on YouTube. Text-based analytics work less 

eectively on YouTube than they do on Twitter or blogs. And many analysts with sophisticated 

As both anti- and proregime interests become 

more savvy, verification 

becomes more difficult. 
USIP.ORG 13

SYRIA’S SOCIALLY MEDIATED CIVIL WAR

data analysis skills lack the Arabic-language competence to assess the actual content (and vice 

versa).  e trend is, and should be, toward research teams with multiple skill sets.

Syria Deeply founder Lara Setrakian usefully emphasizes the importance of contextualizing data, which never speaks for itself. As she put it, “Contextualization is a good faith eort 

at providing as many degrees of an issue as possible, even when you just present one piece of 

information. If we’re talking about one data point, like a video from Idlib, or a rebel in Latakia, 

how much more can we put around that data? . . .  e rst step toward making sense of it is 

understanding the conict as a whole, and then seeing where a single new piece of information 

ts in.”29  e Syria Deeply website oers rst-person accounts of the conict, often supplemented with videos and photographs. Its conict map features not only deaths and refugees 

but also “trending videos” and can be overlaid on an ordinary Google Map, a Google Earth 

satellite map, or a hybrid of the two.

At the other extreme of the context-driven, qualitative deep dive of Syria Deeply lies 

Global Data on Events, Location and Tone (GDELT).

30  is massive event dataset uses 

natural language processing software to code an enormous number of international news 

sources.  e rich, detailed data oer an outstanding opportunity for researchers to create 

descriptive analytics about trends or to test hypotheses about conict dynamics. For instance, 

Peter Aldhouse used GDELT data to produce a visually compelling map of violence in the 

Syrian conict.

31 Its conict map allows observers to sort by location, time, number of violent 

events, and more.

 ere are limitations, of course. To the extent that these news sources depend on online 

content or on incomplete, partial, or biased news sources, then GDELT will reproduce systemic bias. Translation is also an issue. GDELT relies on machine translation of foreign-language 

sources, which could introduce a tremendous amount of error that has not yet been systematically evaluated. David Masad of Caerus Analytics conducted one of the rst tests of GDELT 

data by comparing its analytic results with a range of other information sources, such as the 

Syria Death Tracker and ocial refugee registrations.

32 He found a high correlation early in 

the war but increasing divergence over the course of 2012, which could be explained by media 

fatigue rather than by changes in the actual ghting on the ground. He also found striking 

dierences in the degree of convergence at the local level, with some governorates (presumably urban areas accessible to journalists) showing high correlation and others (more remote 

or under regime control) very low. At this point, GDELT oers a potential glimpse into the 

future of large-scale event data analysis informed by online content, in which analysis could be 

applied to ongoing and developing conict situations.

Some of the most innovative applications of online information in Syria have been in 

the eorts to track, conrm, document, and record the atrocities committed during the war.

Some of these eorts are conducted by activists seeking to document the bloodshed, others 

by governments or international organizations seeking accurate information.  e most ambitious projects seek to establish a documentary record that might one day allow for war crimes 

prosecutions and individual accountability. But even those that fall short of such aspirations 

have become the essential underpinning for international policy, the source of claims about the 

number of dead in the conict, or attributions of responsibility.

For example, Benetech researchers Patrick Ball and Megan Price worked to document 

Syrian deaths for the United Nations. In a January 2013 report for the UN, they were able to 

identify 59,648 unique killings from seven overlapping online datasets.

33  ey sought to set a 

high bar for inclusion in their database: a full name along with date and location of death.  ey 

Some of the most 

innovative applications 

of online information in 

Syria have been in the 

efforts to track, confirm, 

document, and record 

the atrocities committed 

during the war. 
14 USIP.ORG

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reached this conclusion through a sophisticated statistical analysis, which began with a native 

Arabic speaker coding more than eight thousand entries to identify missing information and 

duplicates, and a computer algorithm (alternating decision tree) then dedicated to assessing 

the rest of the seven datasets.  e results were used to present not only the number and timing 

of deaths but also their distribution by age, gender, and location.

Like the other projects described here, this study depended heavily on the validity of the 

underlying data. Several of the datasets employed were produced by organizations that belonged to the Syrian opposition, with two of them eventually recognized as spin-os of the 

same organization.  e analysis had to balance between competing pressures: On the one 

hand, rebel groups had a clear incentive to exaggerate the number and type of deaths; on the 

other, the high bar for inclusion likely meant undercounting, given the diculty of producing 

accurate information from within a war zone. Signicantly, however, at no point could this 

analysis be tested against evidence: Comparisons were between dierent datasets, not between 

datasets and empirical reality. As Ball and Price note, a stark drop in the number of casualties 

in the fall of 2012 could have as easily represented a decline in the reliable documentation of 

deaths as a drop in the actual numbers of dead.

Syria Tracker is another online resource developed by a group of Syrian activists early in 

the conict that uses “a combination of automated data mining and crowdsourced human 

intelligence” to document Syrian deaths and human rights abuses.

34 It primarily used Englishlanguage sources, including news articles and blog posts, and supplemented this reporting with 

an on-the-ground network, accessed virtually through “eld-based eye-witness reports shared 

via webform, email, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and voicemail.”35  e Syria Tracker team then 

geotagged and coded the reports to upload to a version of the HealthMap Crisis Platform.

 ey claim to be “able to verify almost 90% of the documented killings mapped on their platform thanks to video and/or photographic evidence.”

Even more potentially ambitious is the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre, instituted 

in 2012 to collect information documenting possible war crimes and atrocities in the country.

36

It relies heavily on online videos to establish what it calls “a comprehensive, data repository on 

all the human rights violation documentation related to the conict in Syria—a one-of-a-kind 

resource.” Using such information in international legal proceedings would of course require 

far higher standards than simply tracking or presenting evidence of atrocities. Attempts to do 

so would pose a dramatic new test of the validity and uses of online materials to establish truth.

A number of analysts have used videos to carefully document the tactical level of combat 

in Syria and the evolution, nature, and capabilities of the major opposition groups.  eir study 

of videos has informed their description of the tactics, weaponry, and even political allegiances 

of a variety of rebel groups, as well as the strategy and tactics of the Syrian regime forces.

In September 2013, Charles Lister of IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Centre, London 

published an authoritative, inuential study of the ideological trends among the Syrian rebels 

that relied heavily on video evidence.

37  e Syria Conict Monitor, launched publicly in June 

2013, is perhaps the best developed online platform for such analysis and features an interactive timeline of the development and evolution of the various armed groups.

38

Some of these studies have proven extremely inuential for informing broader understandings of the course of the Syrian conict. For instance, Jerey White, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has used videos 

to carefully analyze the military dynamics on the ground at various stages of the conict.  e 

Enduring America website features frequent video analyses.

39 Perhaps the most famous exA number of analysts 

have used videos to 

carefully document the 

tactical level of combat in 

Syria and the evolution, 

nature, and capabilities 

of the major opposition 

groups. 
USIP.ORG 15

SYRIA’S SOCIALLY MEDIATED CIVIL WAR

ample of such research emerged when the blogger Elliot Higgins (Brown Moses) uncovered 

the shipment of Croatian arms to the Syrian rebels through his observation of weaponry types 

used in the videos. Higgins had been deeply immersed in the daily ow of videos from the 

front for his blog when he suddenly noticed the appearance of qualitatively dierent weaponry 

on the front lines. He traced the distinctive weapons to Croatia, and from there unearthed the 

trail of a (presumably) U.S.-approved and Gulf-funded ow of arms to the insurgents.  is 

discovery moved well beyond what had been reported by traditional journalists and fundamentally reframed the debate.

Joseph Holliday’s 2012 Syria’s Armed Opposition report presented a detailed reading of the 

organizational structure and ideology of the Free Syrian Army drawn “largely from the armed 

opposition’s own reports on YouTube and from other opposition media outlets.” Most military 

defections or new military unit formations, for instance, include the release of a video. For 

instance, Holliday describes a video announcing the formation of a new Free Syrian Army 

battalion in Turkey that features not only the commander but a detailed structure and a succession of men describing their roles in the organization. Many of the battles and insurgent 

operations produced multiple similar videos that collectively oered a panoramic portrait of 

the ghting. He was also able to compare the claims on video with external reporting of the 

ghting and used Google Earth images to demonstrate regime strongholds and rebel positions in combat zones. He extracted a remarkable amount of information from those sources, 

including inferences about the levels of political support and military eectiveness at the local 

level across much of the country. But, he acknowledged, “ ose elements of the armed opposition that have not eectively communicated will not be accounted for here.”40  is, of course, 

is a rather signicant shortcoming and could exaggerate the strength or signicance of those 

organizations with a strong online presence while minimizing the importance of organizations 

strong on the ground but with limited online activity. In particular, this could privilege groups 

with stronger links to outside networks that could both circumvent the technical obstacles to 

the Internet and understand the importance of outreach to audiences abroad.

Aaron Zelin and others have used online sources, including videos and postings to forums, 

to estimate the number and origin of jihadist ghters in Syria.

41 Zelin points out that foreign 

ghters are in some ways easier to track online than indigenous Syrian groups are: “Jihadists 

provide extensive information about themselves in online forums, on websites and social media 

platforms—information that can be used to better understand their ideological debates as well 

as the activities they are conducting on the ground.” Such Internet monitoring allowed Zelin 

and others to track the emergence of Jubhat al-Nusra and other jihadist groups such as Ahrar 

al-Sham. Studying the biographies of “martyrs” posted online allowed the construction of an 

authoritative dataset of the origins and aliations of foreign ghters. It also proved especially 

useful for observing the emerging tensions and alliances between Jubhat al-Nusra and other 

like-minded groups outside Syria, including the Islamic State of Iraq across the border and 

al-Qaeda Central.

Not only casualties and insurgents have been explored through online material. Information circulating online has also proven an essential component in the eorts of relief organizations to understand the needs of communities inside Syria.  e Syria Needs Analysis Project, a partnership between the UK and MapAction, aims to produce “situational analysis” for 

humanitarian responders from media and social media reports.

42 However, researcher Greg 

Vaughan warns that “with the information from social media, you need to be careful about 

dierent groups promoting dierent agendas.”43

Not only casualties and 

insurgents have been 

explored through online 

material. Information 

circulating online has 

also proven an essential 

component in the efforts 

of relief organizations to 

understand the needs of 

communities inside Syria.
16 USIP.ORG

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Caerus, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) led by counterinsurgency guru David 

Kilcullen, uses a similar methodology, in this case in partnership with USAID, to produce 

extremely detailed maps of the local lines of conict and governance. In Aleppo, using a team 

of Syrians and data analysts connected to a wide range of local informants, it traced a variety 

of indicators, from food prices and incidence of violence to the manning of roadblocks and the 

supply lines for dierent sectors of the divided city. Its information about local governance and 

attitudes across Syria drew from a complex mix of opinion surveys, local informants, and online 

content. Such information allowed the NGO to generate a unique map of local governance 

and the lines of military control in Aleppo and to identify particular needs and challenges.

Overall, online material has proven a rich resource for journalists and policy analysts alike.

Most recognize the potential risks of relying on material curated by activists that is dicult to 

authenticate on the ground, and have created viable protocols for evaluating particular claims 

or videos.  ey have been less well primed to deal with potential structural biases in the information, however.  ey are much more sophisticated than in the past at determining whether 

an image ostensibly from Syria originally appeared in coverage of Iraq or whether a video of 

explosions in Damascus actually took place in Homs.  ey are less eective at determining 

whether the distribution of available videos systematically exaggerates (or understates) the 

presence of jihadist groups or privileges violent over nonviolent actions.

Syria on Twitter

Anecdotal discussion of the changing ows of information about Syria online is extensive, 

but systematic empirical analysis is scant. How exactly do people interact with one another 

online on the question of Syria? Who are the key inuencers and curators? How have these 

patterns changed over time? To answer these questions, we obtained an archive of every public 

tweet between January 1, 2011, and April 30, 2013, from the rehose Twitter API (application 

programming interface), which included the word Syria in English or Arabic.  is archive included more than thirty-eight million tweets, more than 97 percent of which were in English 

or Arabic.

Several important points should be made about the value of this Twitter dataset. First, it 

directly analyzes both Arabic and English tweets, unlike many of the earlier studies of social 

media and the Arab uprisings. Insofar as Arabic is used considerably more than English and 

the topics and patterns of discussions in the two languages vary substantially, this is a major advance. Second, the data presented here are more representative of the general population than 

those of earlier Twitter studies. As it has been increasingly adopted across the region, Twitter is 

no longer an elite, English-speaking phenomenon in the Arab world. Its use has grown widely, 

especially in the Gulf, and represents a much broader set of opinions than it did just a few 

years ago.  ird, our Twitter dataset draws on the full rehose API.  is is important because 

Twitter’s publicly available APIs are limited in the number of tweets they return and may omit 

tweets for highly active keywords. A recent study of one month of Syria-related tweets found 

highly signicant variation in results obtained through rehose and streaming datasets.

44

Our analysis of this dataset produced a number of intriguing ndings. We document an 

unmistakable shift from English to Arabic as the dominant language of online discourse, as 

well as substantive variation in the topics discussed in the two languages. We demonstrate 

empirically, for the rst time, the breakdown of the broadly unied regional agenda that characterized the early months of the Arab Spring. We show the profound and increasing isolation 

of the English-language Twitter community from the broader trends in the Arabic discourse.

We document an 

unmistakable shift from 

English to Arabic as the 

dominant language of 

online discourse, as well 

as substantive variation 

in the topics discussed in 

the two languages.
USIP.ORG 17

SYRIA’S SOCIALLY MEDIATED CIVIL WAR

We also show the increasing insularity of some major clusters and the changing distances between them.  ese results challenge some common assumptions about the nature of the online 

discourse on Syria and the broader Arab uprisings, as well as some of our earlier ndings based 

on that period.  e monthly distribution of these tweets is presented in gure 1.

To assess the relative attention to Syria online and in the mainstream media, we compared 

the monthly volume of tweets with English-language articles published about Syria obtained 

from the Factiva database over the same period. News articles were drawn from the following 

publications and news agencies: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, and Reuters.  e results are displayed in gure 2.

 e important nding here is that Twitter and mainstream media attention to Syria are 

highly correlated, rising and falling at similar times.  is nding held for both Arabic and 

English tweets.  e analytics do not support claims that social media paid attention to Syria 

dierently or more consistently than the mainstream media did.

We then broke the sample down by language. We found that Arabic-language tweets 

overtook English-language tweets by a signicant margin as the conict ground on.  is is a 

signicant dierence from the ndings of the second Blogs and Bullets report, which looked 

at tweets about Egypt and several other Arab uprisings during the rst months of 2011. In 

those cases, English-language tweets generally predominated, and a signicant majority of 

links opened were read outside Egypt. We were not able to replicate the bit.ly analysis of the 

consumption of links for this report, however. Although English-language tweets on Syria 

outweighed Arabic tweets for the rst half of 2011, by June 2011, Arabic tweets had caught 

up to the English and thereafter never made up less than 60 percent of the dataset.  is means 

that researchers using only English-language tweets would be signicantly misreading the 

content and nature of the online Twitter discourse.  e intense insularity of English-speaking 

journalists on Twitter reinforces the importance of this nding: Not only was an ever greater 

portion of the Twitter discussion of Syria conducted in Arabic, English speakers were largely 

ignorant of the Arabic Twittersphere.

Figure 1. Syria Tweets Per Month, Linear Scale ( January 2011–April 2013)

0

500,000

1,000,000

1,500,000

2,000,000

2,500,000

3,000,000

3,500,000

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Number of Tweets 

Month and Year 

Jan 2011

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Not only was an ever 

greater portion of the 

Twitter discussion of Syria 

conducted in Arabic, 

English speakers were 

largely ignorant of the 

Arabic Twittersphere.
18 USIP.ORG

PEACEWORKS 91

 e Arabic- and English-language tweets tended to focus on very dierent topics.  ese 

were not parallel conversations in dierent languages but instead entirely dierent discourses, 

with ever less interaction as time passed. For just one example, we looked at mentions of the 

word Obama in English and Arabic that included the hashtag. In March 2011, 1.33 percent 

of English and 0.03 percent of Arabic tweets mentioned the U.S. president, showing the relative insignicance of American policy to both language communities. By March 2012, 2.34 

percent of English tweets mentioned Obama, as the debate over possible American intervention escalated, but only 0.16 percent of Arabic tweets. In March 2013, 4.28 percent of English 

tweets mentioned Obama, but only 0.28 percent of Arabic tweets. One interpretation would 

be that Arabs tweeting in Arabic cared far less about the question of U.S. intervention than 

Americans did, although this situation may have changed as Obama brought the prospect of a 

U.S. strike on Syria to center stage in late August 2013.

We then explored the most common hashtags by month in English and Arabic. Hashtags 

are distinct terms preceded by a hash mark (#) used by Twitter users to unite discussion on a 

particular topic. For example, discussions of American policy toward the Middle East might 

include a generic hashtag such as #Obama, which would presumably be used by users of all 

political persuasions. Narrow hashtags laden with greater meaning might be adopted by smaller groups to send a particular message, such as #BloodOnObamasHands or #NoMoreIraqs.

Hashtags cannot be taken as support for a particular position, however, because rival groups 

often hijack hashtags to funnel hostile messages or conicting information to those who might 

follow such a hashtag for more sincere reasons.

Some intriguing trends quickly emerged. Egypt was the most common hashtag in January 2011, but in every month after that Syria took the number one rank. Generally, the top 

twenty English hashtags were dominated by generic terms (#news) and by other Arab countries (#Egypt, #KSA, #Qatar, #Bahrain, #Kuwait). #Iran appeared very infrequently, as did 

the United States and all other non-Arab actors. Online sources in the Twitter sample were 

at the front through most of 2011 (#fb, #rnn), but by 2012, these sources had been supplanted by mainstream media sources. Arabic television stations were by far the most frequently 

Figure 2. Twitter versus Mainstream Media Coverage of Syria, Log Scale

0

10

100

1,000

10,000

100,000

1,000,000

10,000,000

Number of Tweets 

Month and Year 

Jan 2011

Feb 2011

Mar 2011

Apr 2011

May 2011

Jun 2011 Jul 2011

Aug 2011

Sep 2011

Oct 2011

Nov 2011

Dec 2011

Jan 2012

Feb 2012

Mar 2012

Apr 2012

Jan 2013

Feb 2013

Mar 2013

Apr 2013

May 2012

Jun 2012 Jul 2012

Aug 2012

Sep 2012

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Nov 2012

Dec 2012

Arabic

English

News
USIP.ORG 19

SYRIA’S SOCIALLY MEDIATED CIVIL WAR

hashtagged, particularly al-Arabiya and al-Jazeera.  e BBC was the most hashtagged nonArabic news station, and Reuters the most hashtagged newswire. Activist campaign hashtags 

did not do as well in the hashtag analysis as might have been expected. For all the eorts of 

online activists to shape the discourse about Syria, only #houlamassacre, #ramadanmassacre, 

#syriableeds, and #help4syria cracked the top twenty at any point in the twenty-eight months.

We did the same with Arabic hashtags. We could not fully compare these hashtags because Twitter only began supporting Arabic hashtags in March 2012, so the 2011 data were 

unusable.  e data are also somewhat compromised by the fact that many Arabic-language 

tweets used English hashtags. Still, in Arabic, the hashtag trends were a bit dierent. Arab 

Figure 3. Number of Tweets in English and Arabic

0

500,000

1,000,000

1,500,000

2,000,000

2,500,000

3,000,000

Number of Tweets 

Month and Year 

Jan 2011

Feb 2011

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Apr 2011

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Jun 2011 Jul 2011

Aug 2011

Sep 2011

Oct 2011

Nov 2011

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Feb 2012

Mar 2012

Apr 2012

May 2012

Jun 2012 Jul 2012

Aug 2012

Sep 2012

Oct 2012

Nov 2012

Dec 2012

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Feb 2013

Mar 2013

Apr 2013

Arabic

English

Figure 4. Percentage of Tweets in English and Arabic

0

10

20

40

60

80

100

30

50

70

90

Percentage of Tweets 

Month and Year 

Jan 2011

Feb 2011

Mar 2011

Apr 2011

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Jun 2011 Jul 2011

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English Arabic
20 USIP.ORG

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countries were frequently hashtagged in Arabic as well, but there were far more prevalent 

hashtags related to specic places and groups inside Syria. Jubhat al-Nusra and the Free 

Syrian Army placed in the top ten in the March 2013 Arabic sample, for instance, along 

with the capital city Damascus; no comparable hashtags were in the top ten of the English 

sample. In March 2012, the top twenty hashtags in Arabic included Homs, Idlib, Damascus, 

Deraa, Aleppo, Bashar, Hama, the Free Syrian Army, and Assad; in English, Homs was the 

only Syria-specic hashtag in the top ten, and only Daraa and Assad joined it in the top 

twenty. Campaign hashtags such as #stopassad, #uniteforsyria, #1yearago, and #prayforsyria 

(all popular in March 2012) appeared far more frequently in English than in Arabic, suggesting their intended target. Islamic hashtags such as #jihad, #fatwa, and #god were far more 

common in Arabic.

 e high rank of other Arab countries in the hashtag analysis is puzzling and potentially 

interesting.  is ranking reects the explosive growth of the Gulf Twitterspheres over the last 

few years and the intense interest that the Kuwaiti, Saudi, and Bahraini publics had in the 

Syrian conict.  is was predominantly in Arabic.  e retweet cluster analysis conrms the existence of insular and intensely active Gulf clusters: Some were national (especially Kuwait’s), 

but others were dened by particular religious or political orientations (anti- and pro-Shia 

clusters that crossed national borders could be clearly identied).

We used these hashtags to construct word clouds within which the size of the hashtag corresponds with the number of times the hashtag was used (see gures 5 through 9). Doing this 

over time and across languages helps in visualizing important changes and trends. To simplify 

the analysis, we focused on ve months within our twenty-eight-month study period, starting 

with March 2011 (the month the uprising began) and proceeding at six-month intervals.

Figure 5. Word Cloud of English Hashtags, March 2011

Note: Size of word indicates frequency in hashtag use.

Figure 6. Word Cloud of English Hashtags, September 2011

Note: Size of word indicates frequency in hashtag use.
USIP.ORG 21

SYRIA’S SOCIALLY MEDIATED CIVIL WAR

 ese word clouds, like the graphs in gures 3 and 4, show several revealing changes 

over time, as well as language dierences. Both English and Arabic hashtags reveal the 

strong presence of Gulf countries—Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait featuring strongly.

Syrian cities and organizations featured far more prominently in the Arabic hashtags than 

in the English.  e Free Syrian Army and the al-Nusra Front appeared prominently in the 

September 2012 and March 2013 Arabic sets, but not in the earlier Arabic or any of the 

English sets.

Figure 7. Word Clouds of English and Arabic Hashtags, 

March 2012

Note: Size of word indicates frequency in hashtag use.

Figure 8. Word Clouds of English and Arabic Hashtags, 

September 2012

Note: Size of word indicates frequency in hashtag use.
22 USIP.ORG

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Most Retweeted Tweets

To explore the substance of these discussions, we rst carried out a qualitative content analysis 

of the top 250 retweeted tweets. Retweeting is the easiest method by which Twitter users can 

share a tweet with their followers.

45  is method had the advantage of allowing us to directly 

assess the most popular and inuential tweets—which, by March 2012, were overwhelmingly 

in Arabic. Figure 10 presents the number of Arabic and English tweets in the top 250 and key 

descriptive statistics about them.

 e language dierences noted in the aggregate analysis emerged even more strongly in the 

retweet analysis, as growing Arabic language communities tended to retweet more frequently 

within their clusters. In March 2011, only sixty-two of the top 250 retweets were in Arabic 

(24.8 percent). @AJEnglish was by far the most retweeted account, with twenty-seven tweets 

retweeted a total of 2,957 times; other popular news feeds included @reuters and @breakingnews.  e single most retweeted nonnews account was the UAE English-language columnist 

@sultanalqassemi (sixteen tweets retweeted 1,090 times). One of the most retweeted tweets, 

for example, was this English-language news item: “@syrianjasmine: urgent!syrians troops enters the syrian city of daraa, and are shooting civilians of all ages!!a massacre is happening.” 

 e highest-ranked Arabic-language retweet in March 2011 came from the Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim, which translates as “ e Syrian ag has two stars, one expresses Syria and 

the other Egypt”—as powerful an expression as might be imagined of the solidarity across 

revolutions in those early days.  e top retweeted Arabic accounts included Egyptian activists 

such as @belalfadl, Gulf clerics such as @salman_alodah and @nabilalawadhy, Arabic media 

gures such as @kasimf and @alialdari, and Kuwaiti Islamist Ali al-Wahidi @alwahidah108.

Only a small number of users were identiably Syrian, either internal or external; among 

the most retweeted were activist accounts such as @march15syria (four tweets, 280 times), 

@razaniyat (three tweets, 181 times), @revolutionsyria (one tweet, 53 times).

Figure 9. Word Clouds of English and Arabic Hashtags, 

March 2013

Note: Size of word indicates frequency in hashtag use.
USIP.ORG 23

SYRIA’S SOCIALLY MEDIATED CIVIL WAR

Six months later, in September 2011, only 25.6 percent of the top 250 retweeted tweets 

were in English—a nearly perfect reversal of the previous period. English news sites retained 

a strong presence, @breakingnews and @reuters occupying the second and third spots. Arab 

voices were rising in prominence, including the al-Jazeera presenters @alialdari and @dima_

khatib.  e single most inuential tweeter was the Kuwaiti Islamist Nabil al-Awadhy (@nabilalawadhy), who would occupy the top spot in three consecutive samples with his emotional 

tweets on behalf of the Syrian opposition and calls to donate money to the cause.

March 2012 marked a qualitative transformation of the Twitter discourse. From this point 

on, English tweets almost disappear from the top 250 retweets and are never more than 5 percent of any subsequent sample month.  e growth in popularity of the “Syria” keyword meant 

that the 250th-ranked tweet in the last three months would have easily ranked in the top 

three or four tweets in the rst two months (the 250th most popular tweet in the September 

2012 sample received 206 retweets; the most retweeted item in September 2011 received 263 

retweets).

 e contents of these discussions and the most inuential users were also very dierent.  e dominant voices were now Gulf Islamist gures such as Awadhy, Salman al-Odeh 

(@salman_alodah), and Mohamed al-Arefe (@mohamadalarefe). Al-Jazeera’s popular talk 

show host Faisal al-Qasim (@FaisalAlQasim) became increasingly important, placing fourth 

in September 2012 and third in March 2013. Saudi media personalities such as @Shuguairi 

and @Almodier also became increasingly important.  e most inuential personality overall 

was the Kuwaiti Islamist Nabil al-Awadhy (@nabilalawadhy). March 2012 was the rst sample 

in which a Syrian opposition source ranked highly, with @newssyrrev ranking second, between 

Awadhy and al-Arefe.

Figure 10. Top 250 Retweets (RT) in Each Month 

March 2011 September 2011 March 2012 September 2012 March 2013

English 188 64 12 3 7

Arabic 62 186 238 247 243

Unique users 96 137 127 132 144

First RT 497 263 5,148 7,681 1,409

250th RT 44 33 177 206 152

Top users Ajenglish 2,957 nabilalawadhy 1,297 Nabilalawadhy 10,363 Nabilalawadhy 28,574 Haithamalmalih 5,074

and number Breakingnews 1,973 Breakingnews 676 Newssyrev 10,019 Yathalema 8,728 Kuwwithsyria 2,918 of tweets

Reuters 1,497 Reuters 432 Mohamadalarefe 7,295 Algrgor 5,581 Kasimf 3,711

Sultanalqassemi 1,090 ismail_yasa 408 salman_alodah 6,258 Kasimf 4,769 Falahalhajeri 2,175

Nickkristof 625 Alialdafiri 336 Alrifai1 4,763 Hajjajalajmi 4,325 Mujtahhid 1,972

Bbcworld 502 Mohanaalhubail 317 Hajjajalajmi 3,419 wesal_tv 4,159 Almodifer 1,907

Nytimes 410 Aref_12 304 Adnanalarour 2,141 anwarmalek 3,486 Enghir 1,736

Nabilalawadhy 302 Altabtabie 267 wesal_tv 1,808 Bc4arb 2,799 wesal_tv 1,389

Alwahidah108 279 Hasanalhusaini_ 259 altabtabie 1,327 Alrifai1 2,360 Drsunhat 1,392

Alialdafiri 248 wesal_tv 250 dr_almosleh 1,081 _mu3awya_ 1,469 hamed_alali 1,211

March15syria 239 dima_khatib 249 mishari_alafasy 1,060 Sonnaleb3 1,402 Afreesyriaa 1,180

alarabiya_ar 207 Ajenglish 226 Abdulaziztarifi 1,042 Bbrq8 1,127 Strategyaffairs 1,079

Note: To identify influential users, we required at least three tweets to appear in the top 250 to not give undue prominence to individuals with only 

one popular tweet. 
24 USIP.ORG

PEACEWORKS 91

 e news bulletins and Arab spring references that dominated the March 2011 sample 

also lost their prominence.  e top tweet in March 2013, for instance, was the Saudi media 

personality @Shugairi’s raw appeal: “Crimes after crimes are happening in Syria . . . how long 

will God be shamed.” In both March 2012 and September 2012, the top retweet was a call on 

“Twitter brigades” to spread pictures of the heroes of the Syrian revolution (by @newsyrrev and 

@yathalema, respectively).  e second ranked was @hajjajalajmi’s tweeting of information on 

how to give money to support Syrian opposition ghters. Appeals for contributions to support 

the Syrian opposition and photos and videos depicting suering Syrian children and civilians 

were extremely popular. Broad Arab Spring references faded as Islamic fatwas in support of a 

Syrian jihad and accounts of ghting by various opposition factions surged.

Clusters

We next identied clusters consisting of users that occupied densely interlinked retweet subnetworks. We ran this analysis using the same six-month interval as for the word clouds. We 

examined the ten largest retweet clusters in each of these sample months. We then identied 

these clusters by looking at the Twitter bios and tweets of the most retweeted network members, as well as the most representative (that is, most retweeted) tweets within the clusters. Although these clusters are dened by their most retweeted users, they also include many casual 

onlookers that happened to exhibit highly consistent retweet patterns. In other words, not all 

members of the English-language journalist clusters are English-speaking journalists, and not 

all members of the Sala cluster are Salas, but the most retweeted users in those clusters were.

We matched the identied clusters across the ve surveyed months to be able to show not 

only how general trends changed but how specic clusters changed. Finally, we computed the 

insularity of these clusters, which can also be thought of as a measure of their level of fragmentation. For each cluster, we calculated a coecient called the E-I ratio, which ranges from –1 

to 1, –1 meaning that all retweets are internal to the cluster, 1 meaning all retweets are external, 

and 0 meaning equal numbers of internal and external retweets.  ese numbers indicate the 

extent to which members of each cluster retweet within that cluster as opposed to outside it.

What emerged was a fascinating illustration of the fragmentation of the Syrian narrative.

 e clusters do not show polarization, because that concept implies two clear rival poles, which 

we might see in Egypt or Bahrain or, for that matter, American politics. Instead, the cluster 

analysis demonstrated the shift from a fairly decentralized Syrian Twittersphere tightly embedded in the broader Arab Spring narrative into the consolidation of multiple, increasingly 

insular, competing networks. (See gure 11.)

 e fading of an earlier, more integrated Arab discourse is one of the most striking patterns that emerge in the data. In March 2011, for instance, the most insular network was 

one of English-language journalists (–0.311), though one of Syrian activists and Englishspeaking Arabs was only slightly less so (–0.266). One key cluster of mostly Egyptian activists 

and al-Jazeera–related accounts actually had a positive insularity ratio (+0.011).  e al-Jazeera 

cluster maintained a positive insularity as recently as September 2012 (+0.01) but plummeted 

six months later to an insularity almost as great as that of the English-language journalists 

(–0.808).  is oers empirical support to the anecdotal sense of a fairly unied online discourse about the early Arab uprisings. In those early days, people tweeted about Egypt and 

Syria to a broad community and spoke across national and political lines.

By September 2011, however, those two activist clusters had already disappeared, and the 

insularity of the emerging clusters increased rapidly.  e English-speaking journalists now 

The cluster analysis 

demonstrated the shift 

from a fairly decentralized 

Syrian Twittersphere 

tightly embedded 

in the broader Arab 

Spring narrative into the 

consolidation of multiple, 

increasingly insular, 

competing networks.
USIP.ORG 25

SYRIA’S SOCIALLY MEDIATED CIVIL WAR

had an E-I ratio of –0.628, more than doubling their insularity within six months. In March 

2012, the insularity of the English-speaking journalist cluster had increased to –0.869, which 

increased even further by September 2012 to –0.877, and in March 2013 to an astonishing 

–0.912. In other words, English-language Twitter conversations about Syria were almost completely cut o from the diverse and far larger discussions in Arabic.  is increasing insularity 

has a counterintuitive implication for social inuence, however: Being an inuential hub within a particular cluster begins to matter more than the absolute number of followers. Inuential 

accounts within the English-language cluster, for example, might rarely produce tweets that 

rank in the top 250 most retweeted tweets overall but still have considerable inuence over 

how Western social media users understood Syria.

 e rise of dierent kinds of support for the Syrian opposition also can be observed in 

our data. Two important and roughly equally insular Arabic-language clusters in support of 

the Syrian opposition appeared in the September 2011 sample: a Sala cluster supporting the 

Syrian opposition from a Saudi Islamist perspective, anchored by the Sala television station 

@alwesal_tv (–0.439), and an al-Jazeera cluster anchored by al-Jazeera stars such as Faisal alKasim (@kasimf) and Ali al-Dari (@alialdari) and the @ajalive feed (–0.444). Both of those 

clusters would continue in the later samples.  e Sala cluster appeared in every subsequent 

sample, the greatest insularity coming in March 2012 (–0.753).  ere was also a clearly identiable cluster of Gulf Islamists distinct from the Sala al-Wesal cluster, featuring well-known 

gures such as @mohamadalarefe, @nabilalawadhy, @tareqalsuwaidan, and @salman_alodeh.

A Syrian opposition cluster in Arabic could be tracked through the whole sample but 

looked dierent in each sample, likely reecting the changes on the ground.  is cluster featured accounts such as @syria_mubasher, @alrifai1, @yathalema, @revolutionsyria, @anonymoussyria, and @syrrevo. In March 2011, this group was mixed with key English-language 

hubs and activists from around the region. In September 2011 and March 2012, it was mixed 

with al-Jazeera gures. In September 2012, it was dominated by Free Syrian Army accounts 

and hashtags.

No clear pro-Assad cluster appeared among the largest clusters in English or Arabic during 2011 or March 2012. But when one did appear, in September 2012, it had extremely large 

English-language Twitter 

conversations about Syria 

were almost completely 

cut off from the diverse 

and far larger discussions 

in Arabic. 

Figure 11. Cluster Insularity over Time, March 2011–March 2013

–1

–0.6

–0.2

0.2

–0.8

–0.4

0

Retweet Clusters

Month and Year 

Mar 2011 Sep 2011 Mar 2012 Sep 2012 Mar 2013

English Journalists al-Jazeera al-Wesal Pro-Assad

Syrian Opposition Gulf Islamists Kuwait

X X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X
26 USIP.ORG

PEACEWORKS 91

insularity (–0.932), which increased (to –0.948) in March 2013.  is pro-Assad cluster therefore spoke mostly to its own, showing little seeming eort to engage with or persuade other 

clusters—as one might expect two years into a horric civil war.  e most prominent news 

source in this cluster was the Lebanese-based TV station al-Mayadeen. Also interestingly, the 

most retweeted accounts in this pro-Asad cluster included both Syrians inside Syria and a 

number of identiably Shia accounts from various Gulf states.

Finally, as noted in the discussion of hashtags, there were clear and relatively insular national clusters. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were the largest and most consistent of these clusters, 

and Bahrainis were often scattered through the Saudi clusters.  ese clusters were not purely 

national, however: Signicant numbers of Bahraini, Kuwaiti, and Saudi Shia, for instance, were 

part of a broadly pro-Assad regional cluster, and an anti-Shiite Sala Islamist cluster similarly 

spanned the Gulf.  is reects the emergence more broadly of national Twitterspheres overtaking the early pan-Arab character of the 2011 Arab Twittersphere.

 ese data were then used to create social network visualizations on the relationship between the clusters. Such visualizations have been used to identify connections between central 

and marginal actors in a variety of political contexts, mostly in stable countries.

46  is method 

could be used to explore changing connections between rebel and regime supporters, for instance, or the Sala–al-Jazeera clusters or the English-Arabic clusters. Very little such analysis 

thus far has been done in Syria to date, with one exception, the work of R-Shief.

47

 e Figures 12, 13, and 14 present annual snapshots of the Syria Twittersphere over three 

years. Several key clusters in each are labeled. Clusters that could not be consistently identied 

across at least two months were removed.

Note the growing density of the multiple poles as time goes on and the persistent estrangement of English-language journalists from other communities.  ese ndings demonstrate 

once again the insularity of English-language journalists and the rapid growth of the Arabicspeaking networks. Both ndings are potentially troubling for at least two reasons. First, they 

imply a journalistic community whose coverage may be inuenced more by its cultural and 

professional biases than by the myriad constituencies within Syria and across the region. Second, they point to the power of social media to draw people into like-minded networks that 

interpret the news through the prism of their own information bubbles.  is is consistent in 

many ways with popular concerns about informational seclusion brought on by online “Daily 

Mes” and “lter bubbles.”48 Our ndings indicate that language barriers and relatively insular 

national communities considerably exacerbate these highly fragmented outcomes.

Conclusion

Syria’s online media environment is likely to be a model for future crises, making it especially 

important to understand how information is produced, how it ows through social networks, 

and how it gains or loses credibility with relevant external audiences and gatekeepers.  e bottom line is that researchers, analysts, journalists, and policymakers have found astonishingly 

inventive ways to exploit the wealth of information about the conict circulating online. But 

they have not always taken seriously the problems posed by potential systemic and motivated 

biases in this information. Nor have they developed adequate lters with which to make sense 

not only of what is included but also of what is not.

Social media have revolutionized the way that the world has understood the Syrian con-

ict and how that conict has been waged.  is report has sought to move beyond both the 

celebratory stage of marveling at the courageous work of citizen journalists and the skeptical 

These findings point 

to the power of social 

media to draw people 

into like-minded networks 

that interpret the news 

through the prism of their 

own information bubbles.
USIP.ORG 27

SYRIA’S SOCIALLY MEDIATED CIVIL WAR

stance of dismissing the novelty or signicance of the new media content. Syria has been at the 

cutting edge of the evolution of new uses of social media and the Internet by political actors, 

insurgent groups, journalists, and researchers.  ese new methods are likely to characterize 

future socially mediated conicts. Understanding their patterns, implications, and potential 

uses therefore will have enduring value.

 is report reveals a rapidly changing social media environment that has a complex 

relationship with traditional mainstream media. Our research has many implications for 

those studying new and old media, particularly in the context of political unrest and civil 

strife.

First, the growth and complexity of the Arabic-language Twitterverse highlight the importance of avoiding research designs that look only at English-language social media.  e insularity of the English-language cluster compared with competing networks in the Arabic Twittersphere poses important questions for understanding and assessing the nature, biases, and 

inuence of Western mainstream media’s coverage of foreign crises. It is clear that Englishonly studies of digital media are missing so much of the real story as to be arguably misleading.

 is is troubling because, quite simply, it’s often impractical for many scholars and others in the 

West to do multilingual studies. Yet as our conference and workshop discovered, and we report 

here, many creative and even cross-national initiatives take on the challenges of synthesizing 

linguistic and cultural expertise with “big data” methods. We nd that encouraging.

Second, in a crisis such as that engulng Syria over the last two years that roils an entire 

region, social media—or at least Twitter—appear to become tools for the creation of likeFigure 12. Syria Twittersphere, March 2011

Note: pink = English-speaking journalists; purple = Gulf Islamists; turquoise = Syrian 

opposition.

English-only studies of 

digital media are missing 

so much of the real 

story as to be arguably 

misleading. 
28 USIP.ORG

PEACEWORKS 91

minded communities.  ose clusters are exposed to dierent information, have dierent priorities, and will likely respond dierently to new developments. We need to study more carefully the extent to which the network insularity we observe allows videos or messages to be 

“narrowcast” online—that is, jihadist messages in Arabic reach one audience and moderate 

messages in English reach another.  is might also help explain the outsized impact of certain 

videos that cross from one cluster into another, such as the lung-eating rebel commander 

whose brutality might have been common knowledge in the Arabic clusters but undermined 

the English narratives.  is is important because it not only further underscores the value of 

more comprehensive datasets (in terms of quantity and linguistics) but also reveals a complex 

web of political actors and interests.  is should inform strategic communications and public diplomacy campaigns. Policymakers must prioritize understanding, tracking, and engaging 

with multiple competing networks.

 ird, we need a more sophisticated understanding of the structural biases in social media 

and the dicult challenges posed by activist curation. It is not enough to develop methods for 

authenticating particular videos or vetting specic claims, though these are clearly extremely 

important. Journalists and analysts must think more carefully about how to correct for the systematic over- or underrepresentation of particular viewpoints or data and how to check online 

information against o ̧ine developments.  is challenge aects everything from the tabulation of the dead to assessing the military role of organizations that do not post their exploits 

online to determining the moderation or extremism of insurgency factions.

Journalists and analysts 

must think more carefully 

about how to correct for 

the systematic over- or 

underrepresentation of 

particular viewpoints or 

data and how to check 

online information against 

offline developments.

Figure 13. Syria Twittersphere, March 2012

Note: pink = English-speaking journalists; purple = Gulf Islamists; blue = al-Wesal; 

green = al-Jazeera.
USIP.ORG 29

SYRIA’S SOCIALLY MEDIATED CIVIL WAR

Fourth, we need better ways to connect online trends to real-world developments. Does 

heavy attention to particular Syrian rebel groups by Kuwaiti Salas necessarily translate into 

material support to those groups? Do more polarized online communities necessarily mean 

more divisions on the ground? Which groups and trends tend to be overrepresented or underrepresented online?  e holy grail of big data analysis is the ability to anticipate major developments, such as the outbreak of protests and violence, in order to act to prevent them. GDELT, 

the international events database described earlier, is already beginning to demonstrate strong 

predictive potential in conict zones such as Afghanistan.

49 While social media activity may 

someday help predict violent events, to our knowledge no study has yet demonstrated this.

 50

Finally, and related, the implications for policymakers in an era driven by responsibility to 

protect (R2P) concerns are serious. Adherence to R2P principles places an even greater burden 

on policymakers to be certain that the information they are basing their interventionist decisions on is valid. Social media can have the advantage of spreading information about human 

rights violations that would have never made it to the public eye in a pre-Internet era, when 

regimes could exercise much more control over the ow of information. At the same time, 

however, social media appear to have the potential for the kinds of biases and manipulations 

that can confuse rumor with fact and favor sensational claims over sober analysis. Couple 

that with our ndings of media insularity, fragmentation, and manipulation of narratives and 

videos, and you have a potentially dangerous mix of variables that can hamper a reasoned debate about R2P responsibilities and policies. At the same time, the failure of these videos and 

Figure 14. Syria Twittersphere, March 2013

Note: red = pro-Assad; yellow = Kuwaitis; turquoise = Syrian opposition; blue = 

al-Wesal; green = al-Jazeera; purple = Gulf Islamists; pink = English-speaking 

journalists.
30 USIP.ORG

PEACEWORKS 91

online activists to generate greater sympathy or support for intervention should be the subject 

of future research.

Recommendations

What next?  e Blogs and Bullets research program has, from its inception in 2009, sought 

to avoid the pitfalls of straw-man debates between so-called cyberutopians and cyberskeptics.

Instead, we have adopted a dierent approach that seeks to use innovative data to show the 

context of digital media use and inuence. Specically, we propose ve lenses through which 

researchers could examine the complex interaction between social media and political action: 

individual transformation, regime policies, group dynamics, collective action, and external attention. Research focused on these mechanisms and lenses will likely be more productive than 

larger general questions about citizen journalism or the Internet’s generic eects on political 

conict.

 is study demonstrates some of the many potential uses of Twitter data for understanding the dynamics of the Syria conict. But other online platforms may have very dierent, and 

equally signicant, patterns. YouTube, in particular, deserves a study of its own, given the high 

prominence of the videos posted on that site in the conict. Facebook also oers enormous 

potential for research into social networks and individual attitude changes, although privacy 

concerns loom large for anything beyond research on public groups.  e study of mainstream 

media usages of social media content should be extended to include television and to incorporate Arabic sources as well as English.

Ethical considerations should always be kept in mind when embarking on such research.

 is sort of data analysis—particularly of nonpublic information, such as personal Facebook 

pages or cellphone records—risks compromising privacy under any circumstances. In civil war 

conditions such as Syria’s, the potential exposure of activists’ identities risks their very lives.  e 

revelations of the cooperation by major Internet and communications companies with the U.S.

government on the PRISM program and broader Patriot Act provisions cast a decidedly different light on public-private partnerships. Should researchers be using even anonymized data 

for social science analysis? Can privacy be fully guaranteed? What about informed consent and 

institutional review board provisions? Our approach is to use only content that conict actors 

have themselves made public. We do not plan to analyze any data either password-protected 

or otherwise designated as private. Any research team planning to do so is advised to make 

absolutely certain that their published work does no harm to anyone involved in the conict.

 e basic analytics presented give only aggregated trends. If individual users were separated 

for analysis and either hand-coded or subjected to automated content analysis, it could provide genuinely new insights into how personal attitudes change over time. For instance, use of 

particular terminology or hashtags could indicate attitudinal change toward more sectarian or 

more tolerant opinions, with key inection points identied and matched with possible realworld drivers. Sentiment is only one potential characteristic that the latest automated methods 

can detect; others include discussion topics, locations, the use of external evidence to support 

assertions, and calls to action.  ese methods do much more than simply match particular 

keywords: When prepared carefully, they can discriminate between texts almost as well as 

humans in many cases.

 e value of such analysis would be signicantly increased if at least the generic identity 

and location of the individual users could be ascertained. It matters, for instance, whether 

increasingly radical sentiments are being tracked from users in Aleppo or New Jersey.  is 
USIP.ORG 31

SYRIA’S SOCIALLY MEDIATED CIVIL WAR

raises serious privacy and security issues, though these issues are less pressing with respect to 

Twitter (which users intentionally make public) than to Facebook, Google searches, or other 

possible datasets. A major branch of Twitter research is devoted to user geolocation, but much 

of this work relies on latitude and longitude coordinates, which only a small minority of users 

opt to publicize.

51

We also need far better tools for sentiment analysis to speak with condence about the real 

political meaning of the clusters and trends identied in our analysis. Hashtag trends are not 

enough because they do not reveal the content of the discourse attached to the hashtag.  is is 

particularly problematic in light of the practice of hashtag hijacking, where opponents might 

appropriate a popular hashtag to air their grievances. A member of the Syrian opposition, for 

instance, might post a series of graphic pictures of dead civilians with a hashtag commonly 

used by regime supporters. Sentiment analysis might attach an interpretive dimension to the 

tweets or online posts, revealing whether the author was positively or negatively disposed toward the topic at hand.  is is dicult to do reliably for both manual coders and the software 

algorithms that rely on them, particularly in Arabic.

52

 ese ndings also need to begin to link descriptive analytics in causal ways to behavior, attitudes, or political outcomes.  ese ndings need to be placed in the political process and their 

specic eects measured on a variety of potential outcomes. For instance, does the increased 

ow of graphic images in social media lead to greater or lesser willingness to join the rebellion? 

Do they have any sustained impact on external support for the opposition? Do rebel groups 

that distribute such images or videos more eectively attract greater funding and political support or do better on the battleeld? 

 e Syrian conict has demonstrated how the information circulating on social media 

can be extremely useful for research and analysis, if handled carefully. If not, then it could end 

up reproducing very misleading analytical conclusions, creating articial certainty, embedding 

false narratives, and encouraging counterproductive interventions. But done properly, the use 

of online materials allows for radically new and deeply useful explorations of otherwise inaccessible conict zones, sophisticated empirical analysis of broad patterns and trends, and the 

documentation of war crimes and abuses.  e appropriate response to the challenges we raise 

is not to abandon social media evidence, as if that were even possible in today’s digital age, but 

rather to develop systematic procedures to guard against predictable fallacies.

Syria’s horric conict has dramatically challenged researchers and policymakers alike.  is 

report suggests ways in which social media have been or could be used to better understand 

what happened.  ose eects are complex and uneven and do not oer any easy answers.

However, they should allow more eective understanding of and response to future socially 

mediated violent conicts.

Notes

1. Sean Aday, Henry Farrell, Marc Lynch, John Sides, and Deen Freelon, “Blogs and Bullets II: New Media and 

Conflict After the Arab Spring,” USIP Peaceworks Report no. 80, July 2012; Sean Aday, Henry Farrell, Marc 

Lynch, John Sides, John Kelly, and Ethan Zuckerman, “Blogs and Bullets: New Media in Contentious 

Politics,” USIP Peaceworks Report no. 65, September 2010; “Advancing New Media Research,” Special 

Report no. 250, September 2010.

2. Oliver Holmes, “Running Toward Danger, Syria’s Citizens Become Journalists,” Committee to Protect 

Journalists, February 2013, www.cpj.org/2013/02/attacks-on-the-press-on-syrias-citizen-journalists.php; 

Committee to Protect Journalists, “50 Journalists Killed in Syria since 1992/Motive Confirmed,” http://cpj.

org/killed/mideast/syria/.

3. Rami Nahkla, “Groundtruth: New Media, Technology and the Syria Crisis,” IPDGC-USIP conference, 

Washington, DC, October 2, 2012.

Done properly, the use of 

online materials allows for 

radically new and deeply 

useful explorations of 

otherwise inaccessible 

conflict zones, 

sophisticated empirical 

analysis of broad patterns 

and trends, and the 

documentation of war 

crimes and abuses.
32 USIP.ORG

PEACEWORKS 91

4. Chris Zambelis, “Assessing the Social Media Battlefield in Syria,” CTC Sentinel, July 2012.

5. Steven Metz, “The Internet, New Media, and the Evolution of Insurgency,” Parameters, 2012, 80–90. See also 

Cori Dauber, YouTube War: Fighting in a World of Cameras in Every Cell Phone and Photoshop in Every Computer

(Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, 2009).

6. Jabeen Bhati and Portia Walker, “Activists Ensure World Sees Syria’s Bloodbath,” USA Today, http://usatoday 

30.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012-02-22/syria-bloodbath-video-journalists/53213498/1.

7. Holmes, “Running Toward Danger.” 

8. Abdul Raziq, “Syrian Citizen Journalists Risk All to Bring Stories from the Frontlines,” Common Dreams, 

May 29, 2012, www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/05/29-2.

9. Holmes, “Running Toward Danger.”

10. Melissa Ulbricht, “How Media-Savvy Activists Report from the Front Lines in Syria,” PBS, March 27, 2012, 

www.pbs.org/idealab/2012/03/how-media-savvy-activists-report-from-the-front-lines-in-syria085.html.

11. Joe Sterling, “For Syrian Activists, YouTube is a Sword and Shield,” CNN, www.cnn.com/2012/03/14/world/

meast/syria-youtube-uprising.

12. Ulbricht, “How Media-Savvy Activists Report.”

13. Quoted in Sterling, “For Syrian Activists.”

14. Nahkla, “Groundtruth.”

15. Peter Bouchaert, “Is This the Most Disgusting Atrocity Filmed in the Syrian Civil War?,” Foreign Policy 

Online, May 13, 2013.

16. Aryn Baker, “Savage Online Videos Fuel Syria’s Descent into Madness,” Time, May 12, 2013, http://world.

time.com/2013/05/12/atrocities-will-be-televised-the-syrian-war-takes-a-turn-for-the-worse.

17. Jon Lee Anderson, “Scenes from an Atrocity: Videos in War,” New Yorker, May 16, 2013, www.new yorker.

com/online/blogs/comment/2013/05/online-killing-videos-scenes-from-an-atrocity.html.

18. Sadaf Ali and Shahira Fahmy, “Gatekeeping and Citizen Journalism: The Use of Social Media during the 

Recent Uprisings in Iran, Egypt and Libya,” Media, War and Conflict 6, no. 1 (2013): 55–69.

19. David Kenner, “How to Cover the Syrian War without Leaving Your Home,” Foreign Policy, April 12, 2013, 

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/04/12/how_to_cover_the_syrian_war_without_leaving_your_home.

20. Juliette Harkin, Kevin Anderson, Libby Morgan, and Briar Smith, Deciphering User-Generated Content in 

Transitional Societies: A Syria Coverage Case Study (Center for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg 

School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, March 2012).

21. Watching Syria’s War, New York Times, http://projects.nytimes.com/watching-syrias-war.

22. Patrick Cockburn, “Is It the End of Sykes-Picot?,” London Review of Books, May 23, 2013, www.lrb.

co.uk/2013/05/23/patrick-cockburn/is-it-the-end-of-sykes-picot.

23. Lara Setrakian and Deb Amos, at the USIP event “Groundtruth: New Media, Technology and the Syria 

Crisis,” Washington, DC, October 2, 2012, www.usip.org/events/groundtruth-new-media-technology-andthe-syria-crisis.

24. C. J. Chivers, “The 3-Step Method to Analyzing Videos from Syria: The Case of Heat-Seeking Missiles,” 

New York Times, July 26, 2012; Judith Pies and Philip Madanat, “Media Accountability Practices Online in 

Syria,” MediaAct Working Paper 10, June 2011.

25. Sterling, “For Syrian Activists.”

26. Elizabeth Flock, “Are Syrian Citizen Journalists Embellishing the Truth?,” Washington Post, March 27, 2012, 

www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/are-syrian-citizen-journalists-embellishing-the-truth/2012/

03/27/gIQAPaoMeS_blog.html; “Syria’s Video Journalists Battle to Tell the ‘Truth,’ ” Channel 4 News, March 

27, 2012, www.channel4.com/news/syrias-video-journalists-battle-to-tell-the-truth.

27. “Syria’s YouTube ‘War’ Could Win the War,” Christian Science Monitor, www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/

the-monitors-view/2012/1028/Syria-s-YouTube-war-could-win-the-war.

28. One might ask how violent images and content affect audiences. This is one of the more discussed yet 

understudied areas of the media effects literature, especially as it relates to graphic depictions of wartime 

casualties. A few recent studies have tried to test these effects experimentally and have found the results to be 

complex but telling, given our findings about online fragmentation. Both Scott Gartner and Sean Aday have 

found evidence that people reframe casualty images through the prism of their own partisan predispositions, 

for example, Republicans seeing U.S. casualties in Iraq as noble sacrifices while Democrats see them as a tragic 

waste (Scott Gartner, “On Behalf of a Grateful Nation: Conventionalized Images of Loss and Individual 

Opinion Change in War,” International Studies Quarterly 55, no. 2 (2011), doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2478.2011.

00655.x; Sean Aday, “Leading the Charge: Media, Elite Cues, and Emotion in Public Support for War,” 

Journal of Communication 60, no. 3 (2010): 440–65). Based on this, we might expect the graphic images from 

Syria to similarly reinforce the established views of the various networked communities rather than changing 

minds or even pushing the undecided off the sidelines.

29. Guest blogger, “Citizen Video for Journalists: Contextualization,” April 1, 2013, Witness.org, http://blog.witness.org/ 2013/04/citizen-video-for-journalists-contextualization.
USIP.ORG 33

SYRIA’S SOCIALLY MEDIATED CIVIL WAR

30. “GDELT: Global Data on Events, Location and Tone,” Penn State Event Data Project, http://eventdata.psu.

edu/data.dir/GDELT.html.

31. “Charting Syria’s Civil War,” New Scientist, http://syria.newscientistapps.com.

32. John Sides, “How Computers Can Help Us Track Violent Conflicts — Including Right Now in Syria,” The 

Monkey Cage, July 9, 2013, www.themonkeycage.org/2013/07/09/how-computers-can-help-us-track-violentconflicts-including-right-now-in-syria.

33. “Benetech Human Rights Program Examines Seven Data Bases to Identify Nearly 60,000 Killings,” 

Benetech, press release, January 2, 2013, http://benetech.org/2013/01/02/united-nations-issues-report-ondeaths-in-syria/#sthash.yMNH433O.dpuf; for more, see Armin Rosen, “60,000 Dead in Syria? Why the 

Death Toll Is Likely Even Higher,” Atlantic, January 2013, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/

2013/01/60-000-dead-in-syria-why-the-death-toll-is-likely-even-higher/266777.

34. “Syria Tracker: Missing, Killed, Arrested, Eyewitness, Report,” Syria Tracker, https://syriatracker.crowdmap.

com.

35. Patrick Meier, “Crisis Mapping Syria: Automated Data Mining and Crowdsourced Human Intelligence,” 

iRevolution, March 25, 2012, http://irevolution.net/2012/03/25/crisis-mapping-syria; Jim Giles, “Mapping 

the Human Cost of Syria’s Uprising,” New Scientist, www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328576.000.

36. Syria Justice and Accountability Centre, www.syriaaccountability.org.

37. Charles Lister, “Syria’s Insurgency beyond Good Guys and Bad Guys,” Foreign Policy: The Mid-East Channel, 

September 9, 2013, http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/09/09/syrias_insurgency_beyond_good_

guys_and_bad_guys.

38. Syria Conflict Monitor, www.syriaconflictmonitor.com.

39. EAWorldView, www.enduringamerica.com.

40. Joseph Holliday, Syria’s Armed Opposition, Middle East Security Report 3, Institute for the Study of War, 

March 2012, www.understandingwar.org/report/syrias-armed-opposition.

41. Aaron Y. Zelin, “Jihadists in Syria Can Be Found on the Internet,” ALMonitor, October 18, 2012, www.

al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2012/al-monitor/syriajihadinternet.html; Aaron Y. Zelin, “Deciphering the 

Jihadist Presence in Syria: An Analysis of Martyrdom Notices,” CTC Sentinel 6, no. 2 (February 2013): 7–10, 

www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/deciphering-the-jihadist-presence-in-syria-an-analysis-of-martyrdom-notices.

42. Karen Leigh, “The Data Miners: Syria Needs Analysis Project (SNAP),” Syria Deeply, June 17, 2013, http://

beta.syriadeeply.org/2013/06/data-miners-syria-analysis-project-snap.

43. Ibid.

44. Fred Morstatter, Jurgen Pfeffer, Huan Liu, and Kathleen Carley, “Is the Sample Good Enough? Comparing 

Data from Twitter’s Streaming API with Twitter’s Firehose,” paper presented to ICPWS 2013; for discussion, 

see http://crowdresearch.org/blog/?p=6596.

45. Kate Starbird and Leysia Palen, “(How) Will the Revolution Be Retweeted?,” presented at the 2012 

Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Seattle, WA, February 11–15, 2012.

46. H. Moe, “Mapping the Norwegian Blogosphere: Methodological Challenges in Internationalizing Internet 

Research,” Social Science Computer Review 29, no. 3 (2011): 313–26; A. Bruns et al., “Mapping the Australian 

Networked Public Sphere,” Social Science Computer Review 29, no. 3 (2011): 277–87; L. A. Adamic and N.

Glance, “The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog,” in Proceedings of the 3rd 

International Workshop on Link Discovery, 2005, 36–43; B. Etling et al., “Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: 

Politics and Dissent Online,” New Media & Society 12, no. 8 (December 1, 2010): 1225–43, doi:10.1177/

1461444810385096.

47. V. J. Um Amel, “Studying Social Streams: Cultural Analytics in Arabic,” Jadaliyya, October 31, 2012.

48. Cass Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Eli Pariser, The Filter 

Bubble (New York: Penguin Press, 2011).

49. J. Yonamine, “Predicting Future Levels of Violence in Afghanistan Districts Using GDELT,” Penn State 

Event Data Project paper, http://eventdata.psu.edu/papers.dir/Predicting%20Future%20Levels%20of%20

Violence%20in%20Afghanistan%20Districts%20using%20GDELT.pdf.

50. For the opposite view, see Philip Howard and Muzammil Hussein, Democracy’s Fourth Wave (Oxford: Oxford 

University Press, 2012).

51. Kalev Leetaru, Shaowen Wang, Guofeng Cao, Anand Padmanabhan, and Eric Shook, “Mapping the Global 

Twitter Heartbeat,” First Monday 18, no. 5-6, www.firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4366/3654.

52. Sam Petulla, “Feelings, Nothing More Than Feelings: The Measured Rise of Sentiment Analysis in 

Journalism,” Nieman Journalism Lab, January 23, 2013, www.niemanlab.org/2013/01/feelings-nothing-morethan-feelings-the-measured-rise-of-sentiment-analysis-in-journalism.

ii Looking for Justice United States Institute of Peace • 2301 Constitution ave., nw • Washington, DC 20037 • usip.org 

Syria has been the most socially mediated conflict in history. 

Compared with previous conflicts, an exceptional amount of 

what the outside world knows—or thinks it knows—about 

the nearly three-year-old conflict has come from videos, 

analysis, and commentary circulated through social networks. 

These materials have informed international relief efforts, 

assessments of the identity and character of the rebel fighting groups, and debates about international intervention. 

But how credible was such information? How was it produced? Why did some gain attention and other, equally 

intriguing, information fade into obscurity? How did such 

information actually flow through the rapidly changing online 

social media? This report combines a broad survey of pathbreaking work on social media in conflict zones with unique 

new research findings based on analysis of discussions of 

Syria on Twitter. 

Related Links

■ Social Media Reporting and the Syrian Civil War by Anand Varghese (Peace 

Brief, June 2013)

■ Blogs and Bullets II: New Media and Conflict after the Arab Spring by 

Sean  Aday, Henry Farrell, Marc Lynch, John Sides, and Deen Freelon 

(Peaceworks, July 2012)

■ Evaluating Media Interventions in Conflict Countries by Amelia Arsenault, 

Sheldon Himelfarb, and Susan Abbott (Peaceworks, October 2011)

■ Media in Fragile Environments by Andrew Robertson, Eran Fraenkel, 

Emrys Schoemaker, and Sheldon Himelfarb (USIP Press, 2011)

■ Advancing New Media Research by Sean Aday, Henry Farrell, Marc Lynch, 

and John Sides (Special Report, September 2010)

■ Blogs and Bullets: New Media in Contentious Politics by Sean Aday, Henry 

Farrell, Marc Lynch, John Sides, John Kelly, Ethan Zuckerman 

(Peaceworks, September 2010)

Peaceworks • january 2014 • no. 91
 v

About the Institute

The United States Institute of Peace is an independent, nonpartisan 

institution established and funded by Congress. Its goals are to 

help prevent and resolve violent conflicts, promote postconflict 

peacebuilding, and increase conflict-management tools, capacity, and 

intellectual capital worldwide. The Institute does this by empowering 

others with knowledge, skills, and resources, as well as by its direct 

involvement in conflict zones around the globe.

Chairman of the Board: J. Robinson West

Vice Chairman: George E. Moose

President: Jim Marshall

Executive Vice President: Kristin Lord

Chief Financial Officer: Michael Graham

Board of Directors

J. Robinson West (Chair), Chairman, PFC Energy, Washington, D.C. • 

George E. Moose (Vice Chair), Adjunct Professor of Practice, The George 

Washington University, Washington, D.C. • Judy Ansley, Former Assistant 

to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor under George W. 

Bush, Washington, D.C. • Eric Edelman, Hertog Distinguished Practitioner 

in Residence, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International 

Studies, Washington, D.C. • Joseph Eldridge, University Chaplain and 

Senior Adjunct Professorial Lecturer, School of International Service, 

American University • Stephen J. Hadley, Principal, RiceHadleyGates, 

LLC, Washington, D.C. • Kerry Kennedy, President, Robert F. Kennedy 

Center for Justice and Human Rights, Washington, D.C. • Ikram U. Khan, 

President, Quality Care Consultants, LLC, Las Vegas, Nev. • Stephen D. 

Krasner, Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, Stanford 

University, Palo Alto, Calif. • John A. Lancaster, Former Executive 

Director, International Council on Independent Living, Potsdam, N.Y. • 

Jeremy A. Rabkin, Professor of Law, George Mason University, Fairfax, Va. 

• Nancy Zirkin, Executive Vice President, Leadership Conference 

on Civil and Human Rights, Washington, D.C.

Members Ex Officio

John Kerry, Secretary of State • Kathleen Hicks, Principal Deputy Under 

Secretary of Defense for Policy • Gregg F. Martin, Major General, U.S. 

Army; President, National Defense University • Jim Marshall, President, 

United States Institute of Peace (nonvoting)