New Research Delves into the Sunni/Shia Conflict on Twitter

In June, Bahrain revoked the citizenship of Isa Qassim, one of the most important Shia clerics and public figures in Bahrain. The arrest prompted a bevy of tweets from users who both disagreed and agreed with the decision. A number of researchers are examining the Twittersphere in various ways to understand the ways in which online sectarianism works and its relationship with sectarianism offline. In response to this particular incident, Marc Owen Jones, a professor in Germany, searched through the tweets and found that many anti-Shia tweets containing sectarian terms appeared to be coming from bots. After his study, Twitter banned 1,800 accounts that it believed to be bots. In July, Jones posited that some of the banned accounts may be affiliated with the news channel Saudi24 because many of the tweets included links to the website. While bots are definitely a problem, there is no denying that sectarian rhetoric on Twitter comes from real accounts as well. Sectarianism happens both ways, but anti-Shia sectarianism is far more widespread than anti-Sunni sentiment. In a 2015 study that cataloged 7 million Arabic tweets, a “vast majority” were anti-Shia. Likewise, after the arrest of the Saudi Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a prominent Shia cleric, in January 2016, research at NYU’s Social Media and Political Participation lab found 900,000 anti-Shia tweets and only 30,000 anti-Sunni tweets.

Underlying sectarian tensions have always existed in the Middle East, but the US invasion of Iraq coupled with the fall of myriad autocratic Middle Eastern governments led to a spread of sectarian sentiment across the region. In different countries, this sectarianism takes different forms; for example, in Lebanon there is Christian and Muslim sectarianism, and in Iraq there are sectarian divides between Arabs and Kurds, but the most extensive brand of sectarianism throughout the region has been Sunni-Shia sectarianism. Sunnis and Shias have different interpretations of Islam, rooted in the choice of the prophet’s successor. Sunnis believe that Abu Bakr, the caliph who succeeded the Prophet, is the rightful heir because the companions of the prophet chose him, while the Shia believe that Ali, the prophet’s cousin, is the rightful heir because he was related to Muhammad. This split influences differences in religious practice in addition to the rhetoric that appears online today, as does the split between predominantly Sunni Arabs and largely Shia Iranians, who are commonly associated with all Shia in the region. Beyond the debate over identity, most analysts agree that the conflict in Syria has also led to a huge uptick in sectarianism and often shapes this rhetoric, both on and offline.

The anti-Shia rhetoric that has become popular on Twitter includes words such as rafidha, nusayri, majus, and safawi, which are not limited to strictly religious differences. While rafidha, meaning “refuser,” refers to Shia’s denial of the line of caliphs in the Sunni tradition, safawi refers to the Safavid empire’s expansion throughout the Middle East. Nusayri refers neither to the Iranian