Tweets about Qatar: Whos setting the agenda?

Shahan A. Memon
Rohith Pillai

Dr. Ingmar Weber

Dr. Yelena Mejova

Methodology

Dr. Susan Dun

High-level Observations
POSSIBLE AGENDA SETTERS:
The following article in Washington post regarding
migrant workers was amongst the top 10 citations
across many countries..

DATA COLLECTION :

Collected 4,458,914 tweets

about Qatar in 35 different
languages during a roughly
6-month period from 3rd of
May 2015 to 15th of
November 2015
Out of the initial 4,458,914
tweets, 1,837,280 (41.2%)
tweets could be mapped to
a country
Our analysis includes data
for 660,006 distinct users,
covering 173 countries

Distribution of citation for the article "The toll of

human casualties in Qatar"
3000

2500

The graph (left)

shows the
distribution of
citations amongst the
top few countries

2000

1500

1000

500

0
No. of URL citations
United States

United Kingdom

Canada

Australia

India

TWEETS ACROSS 7 MONTHS:

The discussion about Qatar on social media
varied across different periods.

GEO TAGGING:
Using Nominatim, we geotagged the tweets as per
their user-defined location

No. of tweets

Motivation

400000
350000
300000
250000

DATA VISUALIZATION:

200000

Created tag-clouds
Created heat map
Determined top domains,
hashtags, URLs, etc.

150000
100000
50000
0
May

Is Qatars sponsorship
of football clubs and
sport events paying off?
Is Qatar getting the
attention it expects?
What are the key
sources defining or
changing public opinion
about Qatar?

TOP DOMAINS:
The following graphs
illustrate the top 10 regional
distribution of citations of
different news sources
reporting about Qatar. The
radius depicts the intensity of
appearances possibly
defining the public opinion of
that region.

Normalized count of "bbc.co.uk" mentions

Australia
8
7

United Kingdom

Czech Republic

6
5
4
3

Ghana

Thailand

2
1
0

Uganda

Kenya

Laos
Nigeria

Normalized count of "washingtonpost.com"

mentions

Qatar
0.6
Chile

Colombia

0.5

Ireland

0.4
0.3

Honduras

Turkey

0.2

New Zealand

0.1
0
Mexico

Denmark
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0

United States of
America

Japan

Uruguay
Australia

Kuwait

Finland

Paraguay
Sweden
Guatemala

August

September

October

November

The topics around different regions may have

vast similarities (migrant workers, FIFA, etc.).
However, there were differences in intensity of
discussion of those topics.
The tag clouds
(left) showing
variance in the
intensity of discussion on migrant
workers.

Future Work

PUBLIC DEMO:

Ireland

Normalized count of "theguardian.com"

mentions

July

REGIONAL DIFFERENCES IN PUBLIC

DISCUSSION ABOUT TOPICS:

Example Findings

June

The graph (left)

shows the
distribution
of tweets about
Qatar skewed
towards
May and June 2015
probably because of
the Prominence of
the FIFA corruption
case in those
months.

Norway

Republic of Serbia

Create an interactive web

demo showing heat map,
tag clouds, etc.

TOPIC MODELING:
Discovering the widelydiscussed topics regarding Qatar around the
world

Canada

TOP RETWEETED USERS:

USA
LokmanKarki (4479)
Adel__Almalki (4317)
GNRD_NGO (2680)
SportsCenter (1563)
VicesAdulation (1449)

United Kingdom

Germany

Adel__Almalki (2067)
laplandes (1714)
prodnose (1651)
thereaIbanksy (1542)
jonsnowC4 (1037)

Adel__Almalki (316)
laplandes (144)
Tim_Roehn (120)
thereaIbanksy (108)
boedefeld_ (81)

SENTIMENT
ANALYSIS:
How positive/negative do
people from different
parts of the world feel

The figure (above) shows the heat map depicting the

intensity of tweets about Qatar around
the world.

TOP HASHTAGS:
The graph below shows the top hashtag FIFA across 5 countries. The
diameter signifies intensity.

Acknowledgements

Number of #fifa Mentions

Canada

Germany

United Kingdom
7000
6000
5000
4000
3000
2000
1000
0

United States of
America

France

The graph (left)

shows the top
hashtag FIFA
across 5
countries. The
radius depicts
the intensity.

MENTORS:

TOOLS USED:

Dr. Ingmar Weber, Senior Scientist, QCRI

Dr. Yelena Mejova, Scientist, QCRI
Dr. Susan Dunn, Assistant Professor, Northwestern University

Twitter Streaming API

Twitter Inc.
CartoDB
Open Street Maps
Nominatim
draw.io