contributed articles

Doi: 10.1145/2160718.2160736

Twitter sentiment was revealed, along with popularity of Egypt-related subjects and tweeter influence on the 2011 revolution.

By ALoK ChouDhARy, WiLLiAm heNDRix,
KAthy Lee, DiANA PALsetiA, AND Wei-KeNG LiAo
social media
evolution of
the egyptian
Revolution

THe 2011 eGyPTIAN revolution, which drew inspiration from protests in Tunisia and led to widespread antigovernment uprisings throughout north Africa and the Middle East, began with protests on January 25, 2011, culminating february 11, 2011 with the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. 1 The protests and the revolution and their reflection in social media garnered enormous worldwide media attention. While some analysts said social media like Twitter and facebook were not critical to the revolution, 4 others, including a number of activists on the scene, credit social media with helping the movement achieve critical mass. 2, 3 Whatever role Twitter and other social media played, there is no question that the protesters, as well as media and journalists, made extensive use of social networking sites, tweeting and

texting on the protests, with the messages read and commented on by people around the world. In this sense, the stream of tweets represents an enormous, unfiltered history of events from a multitude of perspectives, as well as an opportunity to characterize the revolution’s events and emotions.

key insights

scalable analytics helps make sense of
the influence on and outcome of large-
scale social and political events, as they
unfold.
Advanced algorithms for sentiment and
response analysis helps differentiate
behavior patterns of groups within
different communities.
twitter discussion on the egyptian
revolution was much different from
other twitter discussions in terms of
who was tweeting and what was said.