How Lebanese Elites Coopt Protest Discourse: A Social Media Analysis
Massive protests ignited around Lebanon on October 17, 2019, with protestors blaming their sectarian elites for the country’s political, financial, and economic woes. This reports aims to understand how the political elites coopted the protest narratives on social media. For this purpose, we analyze the Twitter handles of 159 Lebanese political elites, and track their use of the most popular protest hashtags, the vast majority of which were supportive of the revolution. We find that the Lebanese elites quickly coopted revolution hashtags, beginning to incorporate them into their strategic communication strategies almost as soon as the October 2019 protests erupted.
Alexandra Siegel
Alexandra Siegel is an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado
Boulder, a faculty affiliate of NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics and
Stanford's Immigration Policy Lab, and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings
Institution. She received her PhD in Political Science from NYU in 2018. Her
research uses social media data, network analysis, and experiments—in
addition to more traditional data sources—to study mass and elite political
behavior in the Arab World and other comparative contexts. She is a former
Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former
CASA Fellow at the American University in Cairo. She holds a Bachelors in
International Relations and Arabic from Tufts University.
Massive protests ignited around Lebanon on October 17, 2019, with protestors blaming their sectarian elites for the country’s political, financial, and economic woes. This reports aims to understand how the political elites coopted the protest narratives on social media. For this purpose, we analyze the Twitter handles of 159 Lebanese political elites, and track their use of the most popular protest hashtags, the vast majority of which were supportive of the revolution. We find that the Lebanese elites quickly coopted revolution hashtags, beginning to incorporate them into their strategic communication strategies almost as soon as the October 2019 protests erupted.Alexandra Siegel Alexandra Siegel is an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, a faculty affiliate of NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics and Stanford's Immigration Policy Lab, and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution. She received her PhD in Political Science from NYU in 2018. Her research uses social media data, network analysis, and experiments—in addition to more traditional data sources—to study mass and elite political behavior in the Arab World and other comparative contexts. She is a former Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former CASA Fellow at the American University in Cairo. She holds a Bachelors in International Relations and Arabic from Tufts University.