One country, many wars: Social media study exposes divisions among Syrian opposition — RT News

One country, many wars: Social media study exposes divisions among Syrian opposition — RT News:

A study of more than 1.7 million tweets on the Syrian conflict shows that hostilities are not between two sides, but rather between many factions - each with their own agenda and ideals.

Derek O’Callaghan of University College Dublin led an international team of researchers who studied more than 600 of the most popular accounts reporting about the war on Twitter, and over 14,000 channels on YouTube.

The study’s authors stated they expected to find two parties involved in the conflict, each becoming more radicalized since the start of the study period in 2011. They said they expected to draw parallels between the two sides and Republicans and Democrats in the US, as well as with Islamists and secularists in Egypt.

Instead, they found a “convoluted” picture of four distinct groups, each existing primarily in their bubble of shared links, posts, and images that matched their version of the war.

Syrian account network (652 nodes, 3,260
edges). Four major categories; Jihadist (gold, right), Kurdish (red,
top), Pro-Assad (purple, left), and Secular/Moderate opposition (blue,
center). Black nodes are members of multiple communities. Visualization
was performed with the OpenOrd layout in Gephi.