Feminist Stance on Twitter in Egypt

Several studies have been conducted to investigate the increasing use of Twitter as a social media network, microblogging service, or a tool for information diffusion. However, the sociolinguistic role of Twitter as a carrier... [ view full abstract ]

Several studies have been conducted to investigate the increasing use of Twitter as a social media network, microblogging service, or a tool for information diffusion. However, the sociolinguistic role of Twitter as a carrier of stance, which is the expression of writer’s attitudes, opinions, and values, is relatively overlooked. This study explores Twitter as a medium of expressing and manipulating attitudes, feelings, and viewpoints of the propositions made about women in the Egyptian context by means of content analysis. The analysis is based on a corpus of three main hashtags about women in Egypt, in both English and Arabic. These have led to several prominent and active individual and corporate Twitter accounts from 2010 to the end of 2017. We conducted a word query through Nvivo software to identify common themes within the hashtags. The corpus is being regularly updated through Nvivo where the recent hashtags are being merged within older ones. The Ncapture functionality helped identify users' profiles, number of followers and retweets among other things that reflect the potential impact of these Twitter accounts. This was followed by a thorough linguistic analysis of repeated lexical and grammatical patterns that can be used in stance-making towards women, such as the use of adverbs, adjectives, verbs, emphatics, hedges among other things. Results have challenged technological determinism, which  usually overestimates either the negative or the positive effects of technology in society instead of looking into the dialectics of the two. Thus the study has helped, by the careful analysis of non technological forces such as the use of language, conceptualize the interrelationship between society and technology as both shape and got shaped by one another.