Watching From Afar

Abstract

Uses of new media in the context of the Arab Spring have attracted scholarly attention from a wide array of disciplines. Amid the anecdotes and speculation, most of the available empirical research in this area has examined how new media have enabled participants and spectators to produce and circulate protest-related content. In contrast, the current study investigates patterns of consumption of Arab Spring–related content using a unique data set constructed by combining archived Twitter content with metadata drawn from the URL shortening service Bit.ly. This data set allows us to explore two critical research questions: First, were links posted to Twitter (among other platforms) followed primarily by individuals inside the affected country, within the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region or by those outside the region and country? And second, who attracted more attention online: protesters and other nonelite citizens or traditional news organizations? Our findings suggest that the vast majority of attention to Arab Spring content came from outside of the MENA region and, furthermore, that mass media, rather than citizen media, overwhelmingly held the world’s attention during the protests. We thus conclude that Twitter was broadly useful as an information channel for non-MENA onlookers but less so for protesters on the ground.