Arabs and Atheism: Religious Discussions in the Arab Twittersphere
Abstract
Most previous research on online discussions of atheism has focused on atheism within a Christian context. In contrast, discussions about atheism in the Arab world and from Islamic background are relatively poorly studied. An added complication is that open atheism is against the law in some Arab countries, which may further restrict atheist activity on social media. In this work, we explore atheistic discussion in the Arab Twittersphere. We identify four relevant categories of Twitter users according to the content they post: atheistic, theistic, tanweeri (religious renewal), and other. We characterise the typical content posted by these four sets of users and their social networks, paying particular attention to the topics discussed and the interaction among them. Our findings have implication for the study of religious and spiritual discourse on social media and provide a better cross-cultural understanding of relevant aspects.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1908.07811,
title = {Arabs and Atheism: Religious Discussions in the Arab Twittersphere},
author = {Youssef Al Hariri and Walid Magdy and Maria Wolters},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.07811},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
Accepted as a full paper at Socinfo 2019. Please cite the Socinfo version. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo 2019)