Evidence from Wartime Mediatization: Framing Digital Trace of Sheikh Jarrah Evictions

This work provides multidisciplinary research on a large-scale dataset combining close-reading approaches for qualitative and quantitative investigation of a chosen period in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, namely the events of May 2021, which were triggered by the Sheikh Jarrah eviction operation. After the first airstrikes on May 10, the #SaveSheikhJarrah campaign erupted on social media and maintained its momentum for eleven days. There was a dynamic movement from conflicting sides, inclusive of many other countries worldwide from this point. Applying an automated approach, tweets related to these events (370,000 items) were collected to compile a corpus representing opinions and social polarization specifics. Information flows were analyzed and systematized into several commonly occurring themes, using the sixth-step thematic analysis method. The findings show that users tend to share primarily the information generated by gatekeepers such as media giants, artists, and sportspeople. However, the rate of the most retweeted statements showed that accounts without a broad follower base could be prominent actors and speakers within the discourse. Semantic analysis revealed trends and associations with essential terms such as “Israel”, “Palestine”, “Hamas”, “Biden”, and “Netanyahu”, while hashtag analysis showed that even though they do not affect tweets virality, they are still a valuable source for measuring conflict stages.