HOW RELIGION MATTERS: ISLAMOPHOBIA, TERRORISM AND TWITTER

Abstract

Twitter, as one of the most used social media tools, helps construction of virtual communities and provides members with opportunity to reflect opinions, thoughts, emotions etc. With respect to the said feature of it, an analysis of public reaction over Twitter was conducted regarding four terrorist attacks in Beirut, Paris of November 2015 and Babil, Brussels of March 2016. The analysis was based on public hashtags created with city name plus the word ‘attack(s)’ - #ParisAttacks, #BeirutAttacks, #BrusselsAttacks, and #BabilAttack; and 9998 tweets posted following four days from the day of the attack were examined. For the purpose of the set examination, qualitative content analysis method was used and posted tweets were categorized with respect to their general meanings. In order to back up this research, it is also essential to introduce the terms terrorism, perpetrator of the aforementioned attacks, the ISIS, and the concepts of worthy and unworthy victims.