Abstract
Living in the era of nano and hi-tech technologies the humanity faced the issue of the impact of social nets on the society. A special focus is made on the attraction of the opinion leaders ¬ people who are the most respectful among the visitors of social nets. As a result, such people have a very active position in life and, therefore, cannot stay apart from any world situation. They fancy being the active participants of the discussions, debates and other forms that let them express what they think. Not only they reveal the world their vision, but also make others share their point of view. The opinion leaders generate or seed the content in social nets, regulating the society’s mood and spirit.
The analytics noticed the significant role of social nets in the organization of ‘Arab Spring,' the row of spontaneous mass rebellious actions and ‘coup d'états’ in the countries of South Africa and the Middle East 2011. The report aims for the investigation how the social nets influence on the politics. It is crucial because nowadays the effect of the internet on our life is so significant that it rocked the political situation of the global society. The point is to what extent Facebook and Twitter provoked the “Arab Spring” in Egypt in 2011. One part of the population thinks that social nets represent the freedom of thinking, and, therefore, the revolution started from the posts of activists. Others, however, disagree and hold the opinion that the critical situation in the country evokes the conflict between the citizens and authorities rather than the internet. This report analyzes the semantics of Facebook and Twitter regarding the organization of "Arab Spring" in 2011 by the social nets habitants.
Keywords: «Arab Spring», revolution, state and opposition media, social net, Facebook, Twitter, Egypt, dictator Mubarak, Egyptian revolution.
SANA ALSEAYED
Introduction
Facebook is not just a social net; it is the entire world. Many business people, programmers, entrepreneurs, and ordinary users obtained their niche here. Moreover, for the sociologists, Facebook is a good research base. This research the specialists usually do when it is necessary to understand the degree of the dynamic of the development of one or another event or product.
As for Twitter, many companies, and ordinary people use this resource to describe the condition of their affairs as well as to promote the goods or services. Twitter is also an excellent source of data for the intellectual analysis of the texts starting from the logics of the behavior, events, and tone of the expressions, and finishing with the prediction of the trends in a particular sphere. Moreover, Twitter hides a huge massive of information for the intellectual and contextual analysis of various texts.
The aim of our study is to figure out if the net social movements caused the revolution in Egypt, was it the pre-paid action and if there is still some activities undertaken to continue to rock the political situation in the country. For such analysis, we decided to use the free tools to analyze the target content of the randomly chosen according to the keywords pages on Facebook and Twitter. The selected devices were
What is sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis – is a section of the text mining, the system of automatic withdrawing the subjective opinions from the post. Such discipline tests more like the mood of the blogs than their content. There are some synonyms and near terms regarding this branch of the computational linguistics such sentiment analysis, sentiment metrics, brand monitoring, the analysis of social media, opinion mining, and opinion listening. Speaking of the tone of writing works, we need to highlight three options such as the subject of the text, the mood that can be positive, negative or neutral and the object of the post.
An automatic analysis of the text is based on the technologies of the linguistic interpretation of emotions and the tools used to reveal the emotional sense of the target information. Such technology can be utilized for automatic evaluation of any news, products, organizations, countries and so on. These tools became very popular at the same time with the development of The Web that allows million of users to express their opinions in blogs, social nets, and tweets.
Sentiment 140 and Free Sentiment Analyzer
Twitter differs from other social nets by the way people should voice their opinions using maximum 140 symbols which do not make such resource available for those who suffer from an inability to summarize the information. Trying to withdraw the information about the Egyptian revolution, we faced with the problem of too many links for the outside sources instead of the text. So, we could find only several posts contained phrases about the target event. We analyzed these phrases with the help of Free Sentiment Analyzer.
As for the recent posts on the same theme, we used another free tool Sentiment 140, that allowed withdrawing some recently published opinions randomly using the keywords such as ‘Egyptian Revolution 2011,' ‘Arab Spring in Egypt’, and so on. This tool directly compares the proportion of the negative posts to the positive ones, marking the negative posts with red, but the positive ones with green. As for the neutral posts, they are shown as white, although not included into the graph analyzer.
Fanpage Karma Facebook
We chose this tool due to its multifunctionality. Not only it allows to analyze the sentiments of post content, but also it helps to define the best or the weakest posts, the most common words used for a particular message, the involvement of subscribers and their activities regarding the content, the number of likes and the budget allocated to the gathering of likes. This tool was supposed to define the degree of activities of the audience on the events 2011 and current situation. If the chosen pages are active enough nowadays and the tone of the posts in addition to the reaction of people is confident it will prove that the population is satisfied with the current situation and do not consider any other revolts such as the riot in 2011. If the pages are inactive now, or much less active compared to 2011, it will allow supposing the outside force interference in the events mentioned above. What is also good with such tool, it is that we could clearly see the audience’s mood and reaction in overall randomly chose the posts using the keywords.
Data Sets
In both cases regarding Facebook and Twitter, we used the existing account in both social nets to connect the tool with them and to be able to withdraw the posts about the Egyptian Revolution 2011. After entering the login and password, the tools mentioned before could explore the posts due to their sentiments and popularity among the visitors as well as the frequency of posting information. Regarding 140 Sentiment, the positions were analyzed due to their mood: -100 meant entirely negative or too serious attitude, whereas +100 said too enthusiastic or positive vision of the situation.
As for Fanpage Karma, we could expect something more than just defining his degree of the sentiment of each post. For instance, we could analyze from where the visitors of pages with the posts had been. It would clarify the role of external power as it many journalists and analytics said regarding the role of the USA and other countries in the Egypt revolution 2011 preparation.
Text Analysis
At first, we searched the Facebook pages using the keywords mention before. We decided for the random choice to stay unbiased and not prejudiced. Secondly, we analyzed the number of likes and activities of visitors as well as the number of posts for a particular period. Thirdly, we analyzed each post regarding the degree of sentiments.
As for Twitter, we withdrew some tweets according to the keywords and, also, analyzed the content with the help of Free Sentiment Analyzer, calculating the number of positive and negative posts with the help of 140 Sentiment.
Post selection
There are lots of publications related to the topic, so we analyzed all posts found after entering selected keywords such as ‘Egyptian Revolution 2011,' ‘Arab spring 2011,” ‘Arab Spring in Egypt,' ‘Egyptian revolts/riots’ and ‘Egypt 2011.’ We also entered the desired date while finding the posts.
Method
With the help of Fanpage Karma using the keywords mentioned above, we selected seven pages and analyzed them regarding the number of likes, visiting frequency, countries and some visitors from each of them, the money spent on the campaign and overall attitude to the happening occasions in Egypt. The analysis of the location of all participants during the period from January 2011 to the present days revealed the majority of people from Egypt (see table 1). Surprisingly, the number of individuals from the USA were not so significant to believe that American forces were too interested in the Egyptian Revolution 2011.
The next our step was regarding an identifying the degree of activities in 2011, the year when the Egyptian Revolt happened. All pages except one had some posts approved by a significant amount of people (see table 2). Having analyzed the number of activities for the last 28 days, we got an unexpected result – only one page is still active. Moreover, the number of posts increased from day to day. We were interested in such a strange thing. Therefore, tried to dig deeper and discovered that this page was devoted to online trade. The flow of visitors told us that people started to take part in the activities such as purchasing or selling something. As for the political pages, they were inactive (see table 2).
We also need to mention that the signs of emotions such as ‘happiness,' ‘anger,' ‘sadness’ and so on have recently appeared on Facebook, so we could not gather the number of people who expressed the mentioned above feelings due to the period the target event happened. There was the only one page still functioning, so we could see the reactions of people there. The other pages were old and inactive so that we could calculate only the number of ‘likes.’
As for the Twitter post analysis, we found 27 posts dated 2011. Having checked the content of each post with Free Sentiment Analyzer, we got the average result of positive sentiments equaled 87,32 compared to the adverse outcome 72,06, so we can say, that the opinions about the events in Egypt split 50/50.
Having analyzed the recent posts about the Egyptian Revolution 2011 with the help of Sentiment 140, we got the result of 31 positive sentiments related to 20 negative and four neutral. As we can see, the difference is also not so big (see fig. 1).
Result
Having analyzed all used sources and data, we came to a conclusion, that the effect of Facebook and Twitter took the place during the events of 2011 in Egypt. However, while using the tools for evaluating the sentiment degree in Twitter, we had to open each link and look through the material. Therefore, we would name the primary cause of the Egyptian revolution 2011 as the insufficient social and political situation in Egypt that led to the massive rebel from the side of Egyptian people. Social nets such as Twitter and Facebook played the role of fostering the situation by using the provocative slogans and calls for action ("Egyptian Revolution –Not Successful – What Is The Future of Egypt?"). The political slogans of Egyptian opposition “People want the crash of regime!”, “This is revolution for people!”, “We hate you, Mubarak!”, “Game over!” and so on undoubtedly reflected the real attitude and spirit of the population towards the legal authorities. By the way, the majority of Facebook page hosts were male citizens from 15 to 45. According to the statistics, the number of young population increased from 12 % in 2010 to 29 % in 2011 (Guehenno). So, it is a fact that such age-group people are very active and mobile people, and, therefore, it was not a big deal for them to start acting cooperatively to rock the situation.
Moreover, what was the most fascinating to discover is that those who backed and sympathized Mubarak also communicated via the internet. Thanks to the Web, people got the opportunity of the communication, getting and transmitting the information about the happening events in real life mode. Thus, the organizers of the Facebook pages and posts on Twitter attracted more people and helped to broaden the borders of the revolution.
We learned this issue with the greatest interest, although while analyzing we faced with the numerous difficulties such as checking the relevance of the information, the choice of the sources, the lack of time to evaluate all found posts, and others. We also think that only the manual analysis, such as the reading of each post can provide the clearest picture of the real situation.
The location of visitors of the randomly found pages and the amount of visitors per one country visiting a particular page on Facebook.
Detailed analytics of people who support this fan page
7/5/11 - 7/31/16
Works Cited
"Analyze and Improve Fan Pages - Fanpage Karma." Fanpage Karma: Monitor Facebook Marketing. N.p., 2012. Web. 03 Aug. 2016.
"Egyptian Revolution –Not Successful – What Is the Future of Egypt?" Foreign Affairs Forum Newsroom. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 Aug. 2016.
"Free Sentiment Analyzer." Free Sentiment Analyzer. DanielSoper.com, n.d. Web. 03 Aug. 2016.
GUÉHENNO, Jean-Marie. "The Arab Spring Is 2011, Not 1989." The New York Times. The New York Times, 22 Apr. 2011. Web. 03 Aug. 2016.
"Sentiment140 - A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Tool." Sentiment140 - A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Tool. N.p., 2013. Web. 03 Aug. 2016.
