This study examines tweet content from key periods of the uprisings in Egypt and Syria of 2011
and 2012 generally known as the Arab Spring . Some authors and the mainstream media have
suggested that these uprisings were significantly influenced and organised by Twitter and
subsequently referred to them as Twitter Revolution . Other authors have strongly opposed this
idea and attributed it to self-deception in the light of marvellous inventions of the Western
World. They have suggested Twitter was predominantly used as an information-sharing network. In
an effort to contribute data to this debate this study analyses tweet content from three
different observation periods two tweet datasets were collected from other academics and a
third one was crawled from the Twitter API this process made use of the crawling tool cURL and
the database software mongoDB. The combined tweet dataset contained about 1.9 million tweets
out of which a sample of 1945 tweets was drawn. This sample was then evaluated in a
quantitative content analysis according to a coding manual. These codes were entered into the
statistical analysis software SPSS in which they were also processed.
