Mediterranean Politics

ISSN: 1362-9395 (Print) 1743-9418 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fmed20

Framing a murder: Twitter influencers and the

Jamal Khashoggi incident

Alexei Abrahams & Andrew Leber

To cite this article: Alexei Abrahams & Andrew Leber (2020): Framing a murder:
Twitter influencers and the Jamal Khashoggi incident, Mediterranean Politics, DOI:
10.1080/13629395.2019.1697089

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13629395.2019.1697089

Published online: 01 Apr 2020.

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MEDITERRANEAN POLITICS
https://doi.org/10.1080/13629395.2019.1697089

Framing a murder: Twitter influencers and the Jamal

Khashoggi incident
a
Alexei Abrahams and Andrew Leberb
a
Open Technology Fund Research Fellow at Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs and
Public Policy, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada; bDepartment of Government, Harvard
University, Cambridge, MA, USA

ABSTRACT
Social media have played a significant role in political discourse across the
Mediterranean in recent years. In this research note, we showcase the usefulness
of social media data for political analysis by focusing on the main Arabic Twitter
hashtag following the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, October 2018.
We collect a sample of almost 2.4 million tweets posted by nearly 370,000 Twitter
accounts. We show that just 281 accounts drove 80% of the discourse, and that
these accounts can be reliably clustered into separate ideological camps repre-
senting different social forces of Egyptian, Turkish, European, and Gulf origin,
arrayed against or in support of Saudi Arabia’s regional agenda.

KEYWORDS Social media; Polarization; Community Detection; Process Tracing; Mixed Methods

Introduction
Over the past decade, social media have played a significant role in political
discourse across the Mediterranean. Whether protesting fiscal austerity in
Greece, demanding regime change in Egypt, calling for Catalonia’s indepen-
dence from Spain, or expressing solidarity with Gaza, citizens and their
governments have consistently taken to social media to give voice to their
political views and influence the course of political events. And whereas some
of this online engagement has taken place in the privacy of encrypted
WhatsApp groups or invitation-only Facebook pages, much of it has played
out on publicly accessible feeds, most notably the world’s leading micro-
blogging platform, Twitter.1 Indeed, the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 are
often referred to as the ‘Twitter Revolutions’, so important was this platform
in facilitating communication and coordination among social forces.2
For scholars of the region wishing to analyse the ebb and flow of political
discourse, and the mobilization and counter-mobilization of social forces, the rise
of social media is an extremely welcome development. Any publicly viewable

CONTACT Alexei Abrahams alexei_abrahams@alumni.brown.edu

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 A. ABRAHAMS AND A. LEBER

engagement that occurs on a website like Twitter, for example, can be recorded
in near-real time by scholars using free, open-source tools for ‘scraping’ the web.
Moreover Twitter, among other online social media platforms, offers a freely
accessible ‘application programming interface’ (API) to facilitate access. As
a consequence, scholars can document – literally second by second – the
dynamics of political discourse in the Mediterranean and elsewhere. And while
social media platforms like Twitter clearly constitute just one channel of political
discourse among several, their ease-of-access coupled with their prominence in
regional politics in recent years make them a superb resource for scholars.3
In this research note, we hope to offer the reader a demonstration of the
potential usefulness of Twitter data for gaining insight on a topic of political
importance in the Mediterranean. In particular, we focus on a major Arabic-
language Twitter conversation thread that emerged in the days and weeks
following the assassination of Saudi Arabian dissident journalist, Jamal
Khashoggi. While clearly a Saudi political matter in origin, Khashoggi’s mur-
der at the hands of a Saudi hit squad in Istanbul on October 2nd, 2018, had
immediate consequences for countries and political movements in all corners
of the Mediterranean. European states had to weigh the potential lucrative
arms sales and business deals with the oil-rich Kingdom against a brazen
human rights violation. Turkish authorities released a steady stream of details
about the murder, fraying relations with Riyadh as Prime Minister Erdogan
exploited the murder to position himself as defending press freedoms and
holding Saudi Arabia to account for its apparent overreach. Defenders and
critics of the Saudi government took to the airwaves and online to spin their
preferred narrative of the murder to Western media markets and audiences
across the Arab world. Online, as we show below, the incident appeared to
unite a diverse coalition of regional actors variously aggrieved against Saudi
Arabia, including Saudi activists abroad and members of the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood living in exile in Turkey, against a clique of mostly Saudi
accounts and media outlets intent on defending the Kingdom.

Data
Our analysis here, as on other occasions,4 began with keeping an eye on
regional events and social media activity. Twitter maintains a list of trending
topics by location, usually including 10–20 hashtags or keywords accruing
a relatively large volume of tweets. In the hours and days following
Khashoggi’s initial ‘disappearance’, the Twitter hashtag #‫جمال_خاشقجي‬
(#Jamal_Khashoggi) began to trend within the Mediterranean and Gulf, quickly
drawing engagement from hundreds of thousands of Twitter accounts.
Using Twitter’s REST API, we were able to download a sample of nearly
2.5 million of these tweets, posted by nearly 370,000 unique accounts, during
the period October 2nd to 26 November 2018. The size of the sample
 MEDITERRANEAN POLITICS 3

obviously prohibits a purely qualitative approach. Instead, we pursue a mixed

methods approach: sorting and reducing the data with quantitative tools,
then applying qualitative methods and area knowledge to trace the process
of how the discourse evolved. We argue that the insights we gain from this
approach lead to a richer understanding of the Jamal Khashoggi incident, the
political context in which it took place, and the mobilization of narratives to
frame each new development.
Twitter’s REST API allows researchers to pull a sample of tweets from
Twitter’s database up to ten days in the past.5 When news reached us in early
October that Jamal Khashoggi had gone missing, we immediately began to pull
tweets in this manner, and continued periodically pulling tweets for almost two
months, until the conversation appeared to have subsided. Consequently, our
sample runs continuously from 12:00AM on October 2nd, until 11:59PM on
November 26th, 2018 (Greenwich Meridian Time).
Each tweet obtained from Twitter API contains not only the text of the
tweet, but also 60–70 columns of additional metadata, such as the
exact second at which the tweet was posted, the Twitter user who posted
the tweet, and so on.

Analysis
In all, our dataset contains 2,393,719 tweets mentioning #‫جمال_خاشقجي‬,
between 12:00:00AM on October 2nd, 2018, and 11:59:59PM on
November 26th, 2018. Since each user has a unique Twitter ID, we can conclude
that the tweets were posted by 368,744 unique users. At first glance, the
dataset may seem overwhelming. However, there are several steps we can
take to reduce the analytical burden.
Firstly, we can tell from the metadata that 91.3% of these 2.4 million tweets
were actually retweets, or in other words verbatim echoes of tweets posted by
other users. Just 208,708 tweets were originals, and these were posted by just
69,595 users (18.9% of all users). Thus, less than one out of every five partici-
pants in the primary Arabic Twitter thread on Jamal Khashoggi’s murder
actually posted original content; the remaining 81% of participants merely
echoed what others said. We begin to understand, then, that the conversation
about Jamal Khashoggi’s murder exhibits a basic asymmetry: a minority of
participants constructed original commentary on the incident, while the vast
majority of participants (81%) simply echoed the opinions of this minority.
This initial impression of asymmetry dramatically intensifies when we inves-
tigate the retweeting patterns across this original content. Since a retweet is
a verbatim echo of an original tweet, it essentially amplifies the voice of the
original tweeter, causing their words to be read and engaged with more widely.
As it turns out, this rate of amplification was extremely skewed in the
#‫ جمال_خاشقجي‬thread. Most of the 69,595 ‘original’ tweeters failed to excite
4 A. ABRAHAMS AND A. LEBER

much engagement from others, while a very few tweeters enjoyed an enor-
mous degree of engagement. Indeed, the median number of retweets that any
original tweeter received was zero, meaning half of the 69,595 tweeters posting
original content did not generate any retweets at all. Even the 75th percentile
of original tweeters obtained only 1 retweet, the 90th percentile obtained just 9
retweets, and the 95th percentile obtained just 22 retweets. By comparison, at
the 99th percentile, tweeters obtained 291 retweets or more, thus exceeding
the 95th percentile by a factor of more than 13.
We employ a ‘Lorenz curve’ to depict variation in each original tweeter’s
contribution to overall Twitter traffic on #‫( جمال_خاشقجي‬Figure 1).6 We can
think of each original tweeter as provoking an echo of retweets, which
constitute a percentage of all retweets. If we order these tweeters from least-
echoed to most, we can see how much of overall traffic they cumulatively
account for. If each of the 69,595 original tweeters generated an equal
number of retweets, we would observe a 45-degree line rising from the
bottom left corner to the top right corner. Instead, we see a curve that starts
off flat, then turns sharply upwards near the end, indicating just a handful of
accounts generated the lion’s share of retweets.
As is evident from Figure 1, the lion’s share of Twitter traffic on
#‫ جمال_خاشقجي‬was generated by an extreme minority of Twitter users.

Figure 1. Lorenz curve depicting inequality of influence among 69,595 original tweeters
on #‫جمال_خاشقجي‬.
 MEDITERRANEAN POLITICS 5

Indeed, the most retweeted user, @monther72, single-handedly generated

just short of 8% of all traffic on #‫جمال_خاشقجي‬. The top ten most retweeted
tweeters generated 28.5% of traffic, and the top fifty generated 53.4% of
traffic. Just 281 accounts generated 80% of all traffic. In short, the conversa-
tion that played out on Arabic Twitter in the weeks after Jamal Khashoggi’s
assassination was effectively steered by just 281 highly influential tweeters,
among them fifty who drove more than half of the conversation. These 281
influencers represent just 0.4% of the 69,595 tweeters posting original con-
tent, and 0.076% of all 368,744 tweeters. The commentary on Jamal
Khashoggi’s assassination that these 281 influencers chose to give, the facts
that these influencers chose to emphasize, and the views and interpretations
that they put forward, constitute to a first approximation the universe of
salient narratives on this topic. In some real sense, these influencers decided –
in the minds of both intra- and extra-regional audiences – what happened,
who was responsible, what was the motive, and what the consequences for
regional politics would be or ought to be.
Even these 281 influencers, however, were not independent voices. Based
on their retweeting patterns, we can see that these influencers clustered into
several distinct ideological camps or ‘communities’. In Figure 2, we apply

Figure 2. Retweet network of the top 281 Twitter users who together drove 80% of
traffic on #‫جمال_خاشقجي‬.
6 A. ABRAHAMS AND A. LEBER

a standard community-detection algorithm to colour-code these distinct

communities.7

Making sense of detected communities

Generating insights from social-media data requires combining technical
knowledge of data and algorithms with area-specific knowledge of key
actors, intersubjective meanings, and prevailing narratives. In making sense
of the Khashoggi case, for example, we draw on knowledge of political
alignments across the region; ideological leaning of media institutions in
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere among the Arab Gulf states; close read-
ings of content promoted by key social-media ‘influencers’; and discursive
frames utilized in Arabic commentary to defend the interests of Saudi Arabia
or criticize its regional influence.
Given the extensive media coverage of the Khashoggi case, we are able to
pinpoint the timing of key developments with a high degree of accuracy,
demonstrating a reaction among identified Twitter groupings. In using these
tools to investigate more obscure events, key spikes in activity over time
might in turn serve as an indication for when key on- or offline events became
‘common knowledge,’ assisting efforts at process tracing.
We narrow our focus even further to examine a list of 50 key accounts that,
together, generated 50% of tweets and retweets. The same community-
detection algorithm sorted these accounts into five main groupings, includ-
ing one main community for accounts that were defensive of Saudi Arabia
during the controversy, three that were critical of Saudi Arabia, and a separate
community for Jamal’s son Salah Khashoggi – who tweeted only to announce
funeral prayers for his father in mid-November.
We manually checked the ideological orientation of accounts – while the
algorithm can make sense of associations among large numbers of tweets,
contextual knowledge of political factions and underlying issues is essential to
making sense of online discussions and debates. We categorized accounts as
either defensive of, critical of, or neutral towards Saudi Arabia, while also noting
the nationality of accounts and whether or not the account belonged to a media
outlet (Figure 3). The ‘Defensive’ camp was dominated by key Saudi influencers,
who (along with Saudi media outlets) accounted for over 85% of influencer
traffic. A single account, @monther72, drove nearly 8% of all 2.4 million tweets,
garnering more than 200,000 retweets during the time period.
On the ‘Critical’ side, key Qatari influencers such as Abdullah al-Athbah,
editor of Qatar’s al-Arab newspaper, drove over 35% of tweets and retweets,
with Qatari media outlets accounting for a further 20% of tweeting (together,
27% of all Khashoggi tweets).8 Accounts purporting to be Saudi activists, or
activist organizations, also generated around 20% of influencer traffic.
 MEDITERRANEAN POLITICS 7

Figure 3. Breakdown of tweets and retweets by ideological group and national/profes-

sional category. #‫ جمال_خاشقجي‬tweets and retweets, October 2 to 26 November 2018.

Of the 50 accounts, only a few appeared to be out of place. The CNN Arabic
account, for example, appears as a member of the ‘Defend Saudi’ camp. This
appears less unusual, however, considering that the station is based in Dubai
along with Saudi-owned channel Al-Arabiya and Emirati channel Sky News
Arabia.9 Rival stations from Qatar are banned in Saudi Arabia and the
Emirates, while CNN Arabic itself appears to have maintained a more muted
editorial line on the incident than the main English-language station.” While
CNN’s English cite carried analysis of the ‘near comical competition among
[Saudi] columnists’ to ‘kowtow to a different reality’ in mid-October, for exam-
ple, CNN Arabic carried little analysis or speculation regarding the Khashoggi
case.10

Time-series investigation
At a minimum, plotting levels of tweeting among different communities
provides a clear visualization of how Twitter conversations unfold over
time, potentially proxying for broader media discourse as well. Aggregating
influencer tweets and retweets by day (Istanbul time), for example, demon-
strates the enormous media mobilization and counter-mobilization regarding
the Khashoggi case. Among the developments of the Khashoggi story, we
identify seven key events that took place in October (all times given in
Istanbul time, GMT+3):

(1) October 2 (c. 23:00): Initial reports of Khashoggi’s disappearance in the

Saudi consulate through online activists.11
8 A. ABRAHAMS AND A. LEBER

(2) October 6 (c. 23:20): Turkish media reports that Khashoggi murdered
within the Saudi consulate.12
(3) October 13 (c. 13:30): President Donald Trump, in an interview with
CBS News, promises ‘severe punishment’ if Saudi Arabia’s government
is found responsible for the murder.13
(4) October 14 (c. 13:30): On Sunday afternoon, an ‘official source’ at
Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs releases a strongly worded
statement attacking critics of the Kingdom; prominent columnist and
head of Al-Arabiya news channel Turki al-Dakhil.14 publishes
a column pledging a harsh response to any sanctions from the
United States.
(5) October 20 (c. 00:55): Saudi officials confirm Khashoggi’s death, sug-
gesting it was the accidental result of actions undertaken by Saudi
operatives acting without official orders in Istanbul.15
(6) October 23 (c. 13:00): In a speech to the Turkish parliament, President
Erdogan severely criticizes Saudi Arabia for actions taken in the con-
sulate but stops short of blaming.16 Crown Prince Muhammad bin
Salman or other top Saudi officials for Khashoggi’s murder
(7) October 25 (c. 23:30): Saudi officials confirm that Khashoggi’s death
was the the result of premeditated murder.17

Figure 4 depicts daily twitter activity among the broadest ideological com-
munities. Notable activity begins on the day of Khashoggi’s disappearance,
though highest levels of online mobilization extend from the first reports of
the columnist’s murder until respective speeches by the President of Turkey
and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia appeared to bring an end to major new
developments in the case.
Twitter activity in defence of Saudi Arabia reached its highest levels during
periods of greatest potential threat – after President Trump suggested that
the Kingdom might face ‘severe punishment,’ amid the firestorm of criticism

Figure 4. Major ideological groups, October 2–31, 2018.

 MEDITERRANEAN POLITICS 9

and media coverage that followed initial Saudi admissions regarding

Khashoggi’s death, and in anticipation of the accusations that Erdogan
might level in his prime-time speech. While tweeting critical of Saudi Arabia
likewise showed high levels of activity throughout October, periods of peak
traffic appeared driven less by potential consequences and more by new
revelations in the case.18
These tools allow researchers to understand the development of popular
narratives through online speech – not just day by day, but also by the hour
or even by the minute. This allows us to identify particularly influential tweets
from key accounts within a given timeframe. Having determined the approx-
imate timing of news events related to the Khashoggi case, researchers might
then investigate changes in overall levels of activity as well as the content of
influential tweets in the vicinity of major developments.

Conclusions
In this research note we have attempted to showcase the usefulness of
Twitter data for following political topics of consequence to the
Mediterranean region. Focusing on the main Arabic Twitter thread that
trended in the weeks following the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, we
pulled a sample of 2.4 million tweets with more than 60 columns of metadata
using Twitter API. We found this conversation to be deeply asymmetric, with
a narrow elite of 281 Twitter accounts driving 80% of the discourse. While this
hyperconcentration of influence may be deeply troubling, it is a ubiquitous
phenomenon across other political hashtags we have studied, and can be
exploited by scholars to reduce an otherwise intractably large dataset of
millions of tweets into a navigable shortlist of accounts to investigate.
We show how the task of analysing this shortlist can be further simplified
by applying a standard community detection algorithm to cluster the 281
accounts into several distinct ideological communities, representing a pro-
Saudi camp and several distinct Saudi-critical groups centred in Turkey,
Europe, and Qatar. Although we treat these communities as ideologically
static across our two-month sample period, other scholars of Mediterranean
politics have successfully applied community detection to track dynamic
political phenomena over longer spells of time. For example, researchers
studying Egypt’s fraught transition into (and later out of) democracy repeat-
edly applied community detection to show widening political polarization
over the 2011–2013 period.19 Likewise, other scholars have leveraged Twitter
network data to identify the structure of public-opinion formation in Turkey
and study political discourse ‘as it emerges in real time.’20
Finally, having reduced and sorted our dataset using quantitative methods,
we qualitatively process-trace the Khashoggi conversation, uncovering
dynamics of narrative formation and nationalism. Categorizing key influencer
10 A. ABRAHAMS AND A. LEBER

accounts revealed the substantial role of Qatari accounts as well as Saudi activist
accounts in driving criticisms of Saudi Arabia during the incident, while obser-
ving activity levels over time among different communities pointed to the
defensiveness of pro-Saudi counts in anticipating criticism of the Kingdom
and moving quickly to re-frame and negative coverage. We can easily imagine
similar analyses of other politically relevant topics in the Mediterranean region,
and we hope this note inspires readers to pursue their own investigations.

Notes
1. Scholars should beware, however, of platform usage trends, and the relative
popularity of alternative platforms. In Egypt, for example, Facebook is far and
away more popular than Twitter (http://www.mideastmedia.org/survey/2018/
chapter/online-and-social-edia/).
2. For the Arab Spring in general, see Steinert-Threlkeld, Mocanu, Vespignani, and
Fowler (2015) and Steinert-Threlkeld (2017). For Tunisia’s ‘Jasmine Revolution’,
see Breuer, Landman, and Farquhar (2015). For Egypt’s ‘January 25ʹ revolution,
see Tufekci and Wilson (2012) or Acemoglu, Hassan, and Tahoun (2017).
3. For recent work using Twitter to study politics in the Mediterranean and
broader MENA region, see Siegel, Tucker, Nagler, and Bonneau (2019) or
Kubinec and Owen (2019).
4. Leber and Abrahams (2019).
5. To access the Twitter API, open a Twitter developer account at https://devel
oper.twitter.com. We recommend using a Python or R package to interface with
the API. The following article walks the reader through all of these steps: https://
towardsdatascience.com/access-data-from-twitter-api-using-r-and-or-python-
b8ac342d3efe. For further details on using Twitter data for political science
research, we forward the reader to Steinert-Threlkeld (2018).
6. Lorenz curves are often used in the economics literature to highlight wealth
inequality. For their application to measuring inequality on social media, see
Abrahams and van der Weide (2020).
7. We use the community detection algorithm from Blondel, Guillaume,
Lambiotte, and Lefebvre (2008).
8. Influencer tweets and retweets from ‘Egypt’ accounts were entirely from those
either living in exile or with no disclosed location.
9. Dickinson (2016).
10. Compare, for example, the tenor of CNN’s main (English) site with the Arabic site
during October, 2018. The main site carried articles such as Sam Kiley’s ‘How Saudi
Arabia’s media is covering the Jamal Khashoggi disappearance,’ (19 October 2018),
while CNN Arabic touched upon the Khashoggi incident more circumspectly: ‘B’ad
i’afa’ihi bi ’amr maliki dimn at-tahqiq bi qadiyat Khashoggi . . . man huwa S’aud al-
Qahtani? [After being relieved by royal decree in Khashoggi investigation . . . who is
Saud al-Qahtani?]’ (20 October 2018a) or ‘ ’Ileykum ma n’arifuhu ‘an 3 min aladhin
yashtabih bihum fi qadiyat Khashoggi [To you, what we know on 3 of those
suspected in Khashoggi incident]’ (18 October 2018b).
11. Rezaian (2018).
12. Fahim (2018).
13. CNN (2018).
 MEDITERRANEAN POLITICS 11

14. Wintour (2018).

15. Sullivan, Loveday, and El-Ghobashy (2018).
16. TRT World (2018).
17. Smith-Spark and Alkhshali (2018).
18. Mounting numbers of tweets and retweets on October 9–10, for example, were
likely driven by reporting that identified a ‘hit squad’ of Saudi security officers
and Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman himself as playing key roles in the
disappearance. Morris, Mekhennet, and Fahim (2018), Harris (2018).
19. Lynch, Freelon, and Aday (2017).
20. Gökçe, Hatipoğlu, Göktürk, Luetgert, and Saygin (2014).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This work was supported by the Middle East Initiative, Harvard Kennedy School.

ORCID
Alexei Abrahams http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6547-072X

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