What? A new dictator in Egypt?

On Thursday, November 22, 2012, President Morsi issued constitutional decrees giving himself full authority to rule without any constraints by the judiciary or any other governmental institution. He did this, he said, to perfect the nation's democracy. It looked like dictatorship to many. Friday and Saturday were days of protest. Back to Tahrir square by the tens of thousands. Protests sprang up in other urban centers. (Khazan, 11/24/2012)

Protests were not limited to the national boundaries of the country. The conflict became an important topic of conversation and opposition on Twitter. The geography of that commentary is what I will explore here.

In It's a global shoutout Mr. President I examined the global communication leading up to and on the day of the U.S. presidential election. (Boynton, 11/13/2102) We know the technology permits communication from anywhere to anywhere. We do not have a very good sense of the extent to which this technology is being used. Twitter tells us that 50% of their stream emanates from the U.S. That provides one baseline to use in assessing 'global' communication. In the first six days of November 60% of the messages posted to Twitter mentioning President Obama were from the U.S. and 40% were from the rest of the world. The numbers were very large; posting messages peaked on the sixth at 31 million (Sharp, 11/6/2012) And a very large number of users around the world wanted to have their say about the U.S. election.

As people around the world realized that the elected president of Egypt had declared himself able to do whatever he deemed important for the state what was the response? I collected Twitter messages containing Morsi, the president's name, beginning first thing Friday (12:00 a.m. CST) and the current analysis is based on the collection running through midnight Saturday. These were the first two days of constitutional change and the first two days of protest. People could use a number of different phrases to address the events in Egypt. They might have used Egypt or Egyptian protests or Egyptian president or others. I wanted to capture messages that specifically addressed the president, and collecting messages containing his name seemed the best way to do that.

I collected 60,000 tweets on Friday and Saturday. The messages were posted by 30,000 users. That is a somewhat higher average number of messages per user than usual. This was more than just one post and that ended interest and communication.

Geography: There are three ways one might find location registered on Twitter. The 'obvious' way would be for users to give Twitter permission to record the longitude and latitude of the user. Unfortunately, almost no one does. In this case 300 out of 30,000 users. Second, Twitter lets users place a geographic location on their profile page. However, only some add geography to their profile, and it is known that many users are playing with the geography of their profiles. Three, Twitter assigns a time zone when an account is opened. While the user can change this it is not visible to anyone other than the person with the account. There seems little reason to finagle the Twitter entry. However, not all accounts have the time zone information. In this case two-thirds do have the time zone and one-third do not. Time zone is not very precise geographic location. For this two days the world was divided into 131 locations.

It looks like people in Egypt have been demonstrating but not tweeting. Only 2681 of the 30K users who posted a tweet mentioning Morsi were from the Egypt time zone. In the 'neighborhood' 315 users in Baghdad posted one or more messges to Twitter. Abu Dhabi and Riyadh were the time zone of between 200 and 300 users. For the entire neighborhood the number of users posting a note mentioning Morsi was 4164.

The U.S. led the way with 7810 users posting a message mentioning Morsi. It is no surprise that U.S. users were the largest contingent given the overall 50% of traffic for all messages. However, 7810 is only 36%, and not 50%, of the users posting a message mentioning Morsi.

Europe followed the Egyptian neighborhood with 4053 users posting a message. Athens, with 955, and London, with 902, led the way. Amsterdam followed with 634 users posting a message. Paris was 443 , Rome was 312, Madrid was 224, and the rest were 100 or fewer.

South Americans, 917, posted messages mentioning Morsi. The countries with the largest contingents were Brazil, with 282, and Chile, with 199. There were 134 from Mexico. The rest of the countries had fewer than 100 users posting a Morsi message.

The country that surprised me was Greenland. There were 1270 users posting a message on Twitter mentioning Morsi. Kuala Lumpur had 204 users posting a message and Australia had 179. the other countries had fewer than 100 users each. For example, the coldest city in the world, so they say, Yakutsk supplied only one user concerned about Morsi's takeover.

The users in regions or countries identified are 86% of the total. Fourteen percent are scattered through the other of the 131 time zones.

If global communication is Twitter users from all over the world converging on a single topic this would seem to be global communication. The local, Egypt and its neighborhood, are small relative to the total number of users posting. The U.S. is disproportionally small with only 36% of Twitter users who posted a Morsi message. It has not been a huge stream of messages, but it is messages from all over the world.

Not every subject evokes global communication, but there is now global communication that has not been feasible until the new media revolution.

References

Boynton, G. R. (11/13/2012) It's a global shoutout Mr. President

Khazan, Olga (11/24/2012) Egyptians set fire to Muslim Brotherhood offices, Washington Post.

Sharp, Adam (11/6/2012) Election Night 2012, Twitter blog

© G. R. Boynton, 11/25/2012