Twitter as a Multilingual Space: The Articulation of the Tunisian Revolution Through #Sidibouzid

Abstract

This article explores how the Tunisian revolution was articulated on Twitter; it does so through a detailed analysis of a sample of more than 100,000 tweets posted between 18 December 2010 and 15 January 2011 with the hashtag #sidibouzid. In addition to this analysis nine active #sidibouzid users were interviewed. This examination shows that #sidibouzid constituted a global communication space in which different public audiences were strategically addressed through a variety of languages. How key users employed the different languages and the platform itself depended very much on their particular position in the Arab diaspora network.

Keywords: Twitter, Tunisian Revolution, Arab Spring, #sidibouzid, Arab diaspora, activism, social media