The Israeli and Palestine Conflict: Social Media Movements

The Israeli and Palestine conflict is an ongoing crisis between Muslims and Jews. There have been various attempts made to resolve the conflict, but the Israelis and Palestinians have failed to solve a final peace arrangement. The violence began a month ago between Israeli and Palestinian security forces and now it has been turned into rocket and airstrikes attacks from both sides. There have been hundreds of people from both sides wounded including many children who have lost their lives.

This research aims to find out how celebrities create awareness about social movements like the Israel and Palestine conflict using their Twitter accounts. The reason why I chose this topic is that it is an ongoing conflict and more importantly on Twitter, celebrities have focused on “Race”. Every day, the news headlines worldwide are related to the Israeli and Palestine conflict. Readers prefer to read about what awareness have celebrities created. Hence, this study will focus on identifying influencer users in a Twitter network who have largely created awareness about the ongoing conflict.

For this research, I will be adopting the method of thematic analysis for identifying patterns in qualitative data. Thematic Analysis will help me reflect on the reality of how celebrities have described this conflict, the goal of this study is to understand the way celebrities have given importance to the victims (such as by using words to describe the conflict). I will also be adopting the method of content analysis; this method will help me examine 5 prominent tweets by celebrities and how these tweets over a 7-day period were retweeted by non-verified accounts.

This research is an important area of study because it would be a good addition to the ongoing literature on how celebrities use Twitter as a site to educate the audience regarding social movements and overall what role they play on social media sites to affect the opinion and action of the users. Currently, no research has been done related to the importance celebrities have given to the Israeli and Palestine conflict on twitter and therefore, this will add value to the old research.

Research Questions

1. How do celebrities' responses to the Israel and Palestine conflict on Twitter reflect the audience?
2. What role has race on people's identity played on social media sites?

Literature Review

This study will be an addition to the ongoing literature, I will be focusing on two important areas of academics. Firstly, Twitter is being used effectively by celebrities to raise awareness related to social movements specifically giving importance to the hashtag movement. Secondly, the politicization of celebrities affects the opinion and actions of Twitter users. There are not many studies done on how celebrities have given importance to the Israeli and Palestine conflict. Therefore, my research aims to fulfill these academic gaps. Furthermore, this study will look at the role race plays on social media sites in variation to the cause and origin of the conflict.

‘Celebrities considered as opinion leader helps in social movements by mobilizing the followers and convincing them, people targeted through this social movement receive information about the current environment and are guided about the action to be taken’.

There have been various studies stating that celebrities play an important role in influencing the thinking of people. To grow and maintain their audience celebrities have raised awareness on Twitter related to protests, natural disasters, and other conflicts. Is it possible for a single tweet by a celebrity to make some noise about a social movement? Yes, it definitely is as that particular tweet would be retweeted by many other verified and non-verified accounts. A retweet is always a positive indication that informs the information passed on is appropriate to share. Retweeting makes networking easier as people read the given information and share it so that their particular followers can know about it. The concept of connection has been justified because on a site like Twitter it is easy to make connections and a celebrity always has good connections because of the large number of followers. ‘Twitter is used as a privileged tool for building horizontal, ’multitude'-like networks of exchange that facilitate, supplement and extended face-to-face protest movement'. Twitter has always played an important role in increasing the engagement between celebrities and fans. Recently there have been various protests on black lives matter, farmers protest, Palestine lives Matter and kill the bill protest, etc. Many celebrities create awareness of these social movements not only on Twitter but on many other social media sites. In a study similar to this research, Chong and Maria Kim examined @JustinBiebers tweet #prayforparis was breaking news as it got the largest number of in-degree at 4196. ‘Indegree means the number of edges towards the vertex in the entire network’. His tweet was retweeted 51,000 times and received the most number of likes. This study shows that celebrities have a large network that helps the information flow easily and raise awareness related to social conflicts.

Hashtags play a very important role on social media sites, it is one of the most important tactics to mobilize social conflicts on Twitter. Most of celebrities take part in hashtag movements as scholars believe that ‘Hashtag organizing on social media sites has been praised for democratizing social movements and for its potential to raise awareness about critical social issues’. There have been hashtag campaigns #Blacklivesmatter, #Metoo, and #DresslikeAwomen. Celebrities have played a major role on Twitter by using these hashtags. The hashtag #PalestinianLivesMatter which already exists for years again began trending a few weeks ago. It began popular after the Israeli and Palestinian clashes last week. Twitter users were actively engaged in activism, such as there were millions of tweets on #PalestinianLivesMatter and these tweets educated the public and created awareness. Specifically, many users were found to use the hashtag #PalestinianLivesMatter with other activism-related words such as #FreePalestinian and #BoycottIsrael. For example, in the #MeToomovement, researchers have analyzed the words used by users and found ‘Users did not only share their victimization experiences, but they also used their own or other stories to further emphasize action’. Further, social media sites are an easy way to spread information, especially to younger age groups. The hashtag organization is very influential as it attracts users and they tend to have more knowledge related to the conflict. It has also helped in solving various conflicts and impacts on the government. These digital movements play an important role.