Ahmed Al-Rawi

Simon Fraser University · School of Communication

Digital media and the Quebec Mosque shooting

Many scholars cite Edward Said’s concepts of Orientalism and Othering that drew on West-East binaries that position the West as civilized and the East as barbaric. Such Othering is represented in various Western media through the association of Muslims and Islam with violence, fundamentalism, and terrorism. While such representations were being dev...

This empirical exploratory chapter examines a number of insulting hashtags used against Islam and Christianity on Twitter and Instagram. Using a mixed method, the findings of the study show that Islam is more aggressively attacked than Christianity by three major communities, unlike Christianity, which is targeted much less by two main online group...

I investigate in this chapter the social media attacks against female Canadian journalists who have frequently been targeted with online abuse. I used purposive sampling to focus on three journalists: Rachel Gilmore (formerly with Global News), Erica Iffil (freelance with The Hill Times), and Saba Eitizaz (Toronto Star). I employed a mixed-method a...

The conclusion sums up the major findings of the manuscript and highlights the gaps in literature to better understand possible future research about online hate on social media. I argue that combatting hate should not be equated with restriction to the freedom of expression because hate speech is not free speech. To be effective in countering hate...

This chapter empirically examines the multimodal discourses of far-right groups on social media like Telegram, Instagram, and Twitter. For example, many fringe groups find Telegram a convenient platform to spread hate speech without the need to censor their content or fear being blocked from the platform. This study collected all the posts from 15...

This article critically explores the historical representation of the Middle East in video games until 2002 and following the 9/11 event. Using thematic analysis, we identify four main themes and discuss how this representation shifts with time, offering a brief overview of the broader context. I argue that there is a clear association between poli...

In this study, a mixed method was used to understand metajournalistic discourse on TikTok. Using convenience sampling, 30 journalists active on TikTok were selected and all their available 3270 TikTok videos were manually content analyzed. To understand these videos, a codebook was designed in which 5 major categories were identified as follows: 1....

In this study, we have identified a Twitter network of bad actors mostly affiliated with Iraqi militias that are closely connected to the federal Iraqi government. Using disinformation and threats of legal action, these users often target journalists and news organizations that are critical of them. Three datasets were collected totaling about 16,0...

This study investigates users’ gendered attitudes towards Muslim Canadian politicians on Twitter with regard to intersectionality. Its purpose is to understand the tone and intersectional dimensions of Twitter users’ responses to Muslim Canadian politicians and the gendered responses to them. Therefore, we extracted all the available Twitter replie...

I investigate in this brief empirical study the social media attacks against female Canadian journalists who have frequently been targeted with online abuse. I used purposive sampling to focus on three journalists: Rachel Gilmore (formerly with Global News), Erica Iffil (freelance with The Hill Times), and Saba Eitizaz (Toronto Star). I employed a...

Hate influencers play a critical role in platforming hate. In this article, we illustrate how visible (forward-facing) and invisible (faceless) hate influencers mobilize far-right hate groups in the mobile socio-sphere. Based on our digital multimodal walkthrough method and multimodal discourse analysis, we analyze 16 Telegram channels for two desi...

UNSTRUCTURED This study analyses how social media users discuss the topic of misinformation related to electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) notably vaping products. While there has been substantial analysis of social media content deemed to spread misinformation about ENDS use, the strategic use of misinformation accusations to undermine opp...

Background While there has been substantial analysis of social media content deemed to spread misinformation about electronic nicotine delivery systems use, the strategic use of misinformation accusations to undermine opposing views has received limited attention. Objective This study aims to fill this gap by analyzing how social media users discu...

Effective science communication is challenging when scientific messages are informed by a continually updating evidence base and must often compete against misinformation. We argue that we need a new program of science communication as collective intelligence—a collaborative approach, supported by technology. This would have four key advantages ove...

Research has shown that Black politicians in the Global North contend with higher instances of abusive language on social media platforms. The study investigates how public interactions engage with the intersectional positionalities of nine Black Canadian politicians. We collected all the replies to tweets posted by the politicians from 2006 to 202...

This study investigates how Canadian journalists view dark participation and respond to it. Based on interviews with 15 journalists, it explores their concern about dark participation practices especially in relation to the issues of hate speech, dis/misinformation, and trolling. Combined with the ripple effects of social media in delivering news c...

Introduction/objective: During the COVID-19 pandemic, frontline workers have taken to social media platforms to discuss a variety of issues that concern their personal and professional lives. In particular, TikTok's increased prominence as a social media channel has proved significant for enhancing the public presence of healthcare workers and the...

Effective science communication is challenging when scientific messages are informed by a continually updating evidence base and must often compete against misinformation. We argue for the need for a new programme of science communication as collective intelligence—a collaborative approach, supported by technology. This would have four key advantag...

This paper examines the anti-mask and anti-lockdown online movement in connection to the COVID-19 pandemic. To combat the spread of the coronavirus, health officials around the world urged and/or mandated citizens to wear facemasks and adopt physical distancing measures. These health policies and guidelines have become highly politicized in some pa...

We collected data from Twitter and used content analysis to better understand the gendered discussion around COVID-19 as a hoax. We identified three main categories in the inductive stage of the research: (1) sympathetic to human rights & perceived injustice, (2) invincibility and superiority of COVID hoaxers, (3) conspiracies and/or hidden agendas...

Beliefs play a central role in our lives. They lie at the heart of what makes us human, they shape the organization and functioning of our minds, they define the boundaries of our culture, and they guide our motivation and behavior. Given their central importance, researchers across a number of disciplines have studied beliefs, leading to results a...

This paper offers a critical examination of Canadian news guidelines and policies on user-generated content (UGC) posted on news-related comment sections and social media. The outline of how news-related UGC is moderated within Canadian news is achieved by looking at the online comment policies of major Canadian news organizations like . the CBC, C...

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has drawn attention to various inequalities in global societies, highlighting discrepancies in terms of safety, accessibility, and overall health. In particular, sex workers are disproportionately at risk due to the nature of their work and the social stigma that comes alongside it. Objective: This study examine...

This empirical exploratory study examines a number of insulting hashtags used against Islam and Christianity on Twitter and Instagram. Using a mixed method, the findings of the study show that Islam is more aggressively attacked than Christianity by three major communities, unlike Christianity, which is targeted much less by two main online groups....

This paper deals with foreign state-run media outlets that disseminate Persian language news targeted to the Iranian public. More specifically, it focuses on the mobile news app Telegram by undertaking a content analysis of a sample of the top 400 most viewed stories across four channels, i.e., BBC Persian, Voice of America’s Persian language servi...

This paper analyzes the proliferation of memes linked to COVID-19 and climate change online discussions, looking particularly at how themes related to these two issues intersect with each other. To better understand the intersections, cross-pollinations, and mutations between these different but related forms of information dissemination, our resea...

Introduction: Google Autocomplete Algorithms Despite recent attention to the impact of social media platforms on political discourse and public opinion, most people locate their news on search engines (Robertson et al.). When a user conducts a search, millions of outputs, in the form of videos, images, articles, and Websites are sorted to present t...

We explore the common attributes of political conflicts in which scientific findings have a central role, using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, but also drawing on long-standing conflicts over climate change and vaccinations. We analyze situations in which the systematic spread of disinformation or conspiracy theories undermines public trust...

UNSTRUCTURED This study empirically examines the way Arabic speakers use specific hashtags on Twitter to express anti-vaccine and anti-pandemic views. By exploring this topic, we aim at filling a gap in literature that can help in understanding Arabic language conspiracies around Covid-19. After downloading a large dataset from Twitter, we content...

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has been occurring concurrently with an infodemic of misinformation about the virus. Spreading primarily on social media, there has been a significant academic effort to understand the English side of this infodemic. However, much less attention has been paid to the Arabic side. Objective: There is an urgent nee...

BACKGROUND The COVID-19 pandemic has drawn attention to various inequalities in global societies, highlighting discrepancies in terms of safety, accessibility, and overall health. In particular, sex workers are disproportionately at-risk due to the nature of their work and the social stigma that comes alongside it. Thus, this study examines how pub...

The study analyzes Russian and Iranian trolls’ intervention in Canadian politics focusing on the 2015 election, revealing a wide spectrum of disinformation. Russian trolls showed some support for then prime minister Stephen Harper and were very critical of the current prime minister, Justin Trudeau. Also, they closely aligned themselves with conser...

Background: This study empirically examines the multimodal discourses of far-right groups on mobile apps. Many fringe groups find Telegram a convenient platform to spread hate speech without the need to censor their content or fear being blocked from the platform. Analysis: This study collected all the posts from 15 far-right Telegram channels. The...

The Ebola virus is a rare but often, severe and fatal illness in humans. It spreads from animals to humans and then transgresses through human-to-human transmission. The 2014 Ebola virus disease outbreak captured substantial media attention around the world, which is the cornerstone of our study since it can inform us about the current news coverag...

In this empirical study, we collected about 6.8 million tweets that mentioned “fake news”, and we extracted references to climate change and/or global warming to understand the public discourses around these two issues. Using a mixed method, the study’s findings show that there is a clear politically polarized discussion on climate change. We found...

We explore the official state news agencies’ digital platforms of 10 Arab countries depict the “Arab Spring.” We argue that these agencies serve as “discursive propagators” because their outreach is widespread throughout the media ecosystem and are regarded as one of the only official sources of news on the protest movements in these respective cou...

This study empirically investigates two controversial Canadian news media outlets in an attempt to detect and analyze “fake news”. Relying on academic and general literature about fact-checking, the main goal of this study is to elaborate on the methodological challenges we faced in detecting and analyzing “fake news”. We discuss our case study whi...

This paper deals with a case study that provides unique and original insight into social media credibility attacks against the Saudi journalist and activist, Jamal Khashoggi. To get the data, I searched all the state-run tweets sent by Arab trolls (78,274,588 in total), and I used Cedar, Canada’s supercomputer, to extract all the videos and images...

We collected over 50 million tweets referencing COVID-19 to understand the public’s gendered discourses and concerns during the pandemic. We filtered the tweets based on English language and among three gender categories: men, women, and sexual and gender minorities. We used a mixed-method approach that included topic modelling, sentiment analysis,...

We investigate the gendered use of Instagram memes on COVID-19 using a mixed-analysis approach. We find that memes referencing women are mostly related to community support and healthcare, which often express gratitude for frontline workers, while the majority of memes on men refer to news and promotion as well as suffering due to the high death ra...

Blockchain has become a hot topic in technology, finance, regulation, and the wider society in recent years. Along the way, various users and interests have shaped the technology materially and discursively. This paper investigates the debate taking place on Twitter surrounding blockchain technology to understand the nature and development of its o...

This study employs the news values theory and method in the examination of a large dataset of international news retrieved from Instagram. News values theory itself is subjected to critical examination, highlighting its strengths and weaknesses. Using a mixed method that includes content analysis and topic modeling, the study investigates the major...

In this study, we used a multimodal method to examine a visual dataset posted on Instagram that references #CNN and #FoxNews. Using visual analysis, we inductively categorized the memes into nine major types and identified the most referenced hashtags associated with these memes. Our method provided more insight into the different meanings of memes...

To understand the burdens of “representing diversity” in multicultural democracies, this paper empirically explores Twitter posts about two female Muslim Canadian politicians, Iqra Khalid and Maryam Monsef. Using a mixed method approach, the study reveals that the majority of the most retweeted posts referring to the two members of Parliament were...

Twitter is a key site for understanding the highly polarized and politicized debate around climate change. We examined large datasets comprising about 15 million tweets from different parts of the world referencing climate change and global warming. Our examination of the twenty most active users employing the term ‘global warming’ are likely to be...

Background:In recent decades, climate has become one of the most hotly contested issues in relation to the ecological crisis. It encompasses challenges of such magnitude that “climate change” on its own has almost come to constitute a multidisciplinary area of research where scholarly and popular discourses interact forcefully. Analysis:This articl...

Political memes have been previously studied in different contexts, but this study fills a gap in literature by employing a mixed method to provide insight into the discourses of fake news on Instagram. The author collected more than 550,000 Instagram posts sent by over 198,000 unique users from 24 February 2012 to 21 December 2018, using the hasht...

Some social media platforms have strict regulations regarding the promotion of illicit and controlled drug on their sites. This study attempts to examine whether social media outlets like Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr have implemented practical measures to stop the active promotion of such drugs. We examined over 2.6 million social media posts taken f...

Background The online discussion around the COVID-19 pandemic is multifaceted, and it is important to examine the different ways by which online users express themselves. Since emojis are used as effective vehicles to convey ideas and sentiments, they can offer important insight into the public’s gendered discourses about the pandemic. Objective T...

UNSTRUCTURED The 2014 Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak captured substantial media attention around the world. This paper investigates the media coverage of Ebola in five pairs of English and Arabic international television media outlets (BBC, CNN, SkyNews, RT, and France24) by examining the headlines of 298,559 news stories that those respective...

In this study, we examined the activities of automated social media accounts or bots that tweet or retweet referencing #COVID-19 and #COVID19. From a total sample of over 50 million tweets, we used a mixed method to extract more than 185,000 messages posted by 127 bots. Our findings show that the majority of these bots tweet, retweet and mention ma...

This paper attempts to map the major changes and developments of British public diplomacy in the Arab world. I argue here that the BBC and the British Council have greatly assisted British public diplomacy efforts and can be regarded as effective because exerting influence in an indirect way can often be more effective than the direct advocacy appr...

This paper examines social media ads purchased by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA). Using a public dataset, we employ a mixed method to analyze the thematic and strategic patterns of these ads. Due to Facebook and Instagram’s promotional features, IRA managed to microtarget audiences mostly located in the United States fitting its message...

The study attempts to understand what attracts online audiences to the social media outlets of celebrity journalists in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region by examining the most replied-to tweets and the most commented-on Facebook posts in order to understand what audiences find appealing and interesting. The focus of the study is relate...

BACKGROUND In this study, we examined the activities of automated social media accounts or bots that tweet or retweet referencing #COVID-19 and #COVID19. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study is to identify bot accounts to understand the nature of messages sent by them on COVID-19. Social media bots have been widely discussed in academic literature...

BACKGROUND The online discussion around the COVID-19 pandemic is multifaceted, and it is important to examine the different ways by which online users express themselves. Since emojis are used as effective vehicles to convey ideas and sentiments, they can offer important insight into the public’s gendered discourses about the pandemic. OBJECTIVE T...

This study examines public discourse, on Instagram and Twitter, related to the alt-right group which call themselves: Kekistanis. It offers an empirical understanding of this community, which uses highly-divisive language in promoting white supremacy through targeted memes. After tracing the origins and nature of the Kekistanis’ coded language, I p...

Several studies have been written that provided extensive details on various areas and historical stages of US public diplomacy in the Middle East (Vaughan, 2005; Rugh, 2006 & 2014; Cull, 2008, 2009, & 2012; Seib, 2009 & 2012). After offering a brief survey of the different developments in American public diplomacy efforts in the Middle East, this...

This article focuses on ISIS followers on Twitter in an effort to understand the nature of their social media propaganda. The research study provides unique insight into one of the largest data sets that investigates ISIS propaganda efforts on Twitter by examining over 50 million tweets posted by more than 8 million unique users that referenced the...

This paper examines news and emotions by studying Facebook Reactions (emojis) that were introduced in February 2016. Four main emotions are investigated by exploring readers’ reactions to news stories selected from a sample of over 12,000 news items posted on the English language Facebook pages of CNN, ABC News, BBC, and Sky News in 2016. There is...

Mobile news apps have become increasingly popular all around the world due to the proliferation of mobile communication technologies. Many news apps are transnational in nature, and their users practice what Richard Falk calls ‘globalization from below’ (2014) with their use of transnational ethnic media outlets. By exploring some publicly availabl...

This article focuses on the study of online communities and introduces an empirical study of social media production involving an online group called “Arab Canadians”. The study builds on Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities’ and argues that Facebook provides the platform for an online nation in which users, whether Canadians or prospective...

Fentanyl sale is often promoted on social media, but there is very little empirical and systematic research on this issue. This study attempts to fill a gap in the literature by utilizing big data and computational as well as qualitative analyses to better understand this phenomenon. The study’s sample includes a unique dataset of over 6 million tw...

In its efforts to establish order and legitimacy among the people it once controlled, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria followed standardized and systematic nation-state building policies. The terrorist group attempted to establish an imagined jihadist nation-state with the assistance of standardized media productions and practices. These media produ...

Gaming in the Middle East is still an under-researched topic, especially if one takes into account that the region has “the fastest growing communities of online gamers in the world, and demographics mean this is likely to remain true for many years.”1 Instead of examining the portrayal of Arab characters in Western or Middle Eastern video games, c...

This article examines the press coverage accorded to Canadian youth of Somali origin in the Canadian press using two methodological procedures. Charting the representational clusters that cohere around Canadian Black male youth of Somali heritage reveals the circulation of stereotypical tropes that are mostly circumscribed within the framework of c...

This article offers insight into the role of hacking during the Qatar diplomatic crisis in 2017. I argue that the Middle East region has been witnessing an ongoing cyberconflict waged among different factions separated along regional rivalries, political alliances, and sectarian divisions. In relation to Qatar, systematic and well-calculated cybero...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine one of the largest data sets on the hashtag use of #fakenews that comprises over 14m tweets sent by more than 2.4m users. Design/methodology/approach Tweets referencing the hashtag (#fakenews) were collected for a period of over one year from January 3 to May 7 of 2018. Bot detection tools were emplo...