Analysing Online Cultural Disengagement in the Arab Twittersphere

The rapid growth of social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter coincides with the number of studies that consider it as a promising source of data. Researchers use the data of social networks to measure, forecast, and influence the trends and attitudes of peoples and communities. In my research, I will proceed the works that I did in our master thesis. The main objective is to understand better the main factors that Twitter, as a social media tool, might provide to motivate cultural disengagements. The cultural disengagement contains different aspects, but our case study is the Arab atheists and their transition from their religion. In other words, the study considers the Arab atheists who declined their religions and declared that in Twitter. The done work includes analysing the data that is published by Arab users on Twitter including their relationships, interactions, and tweets. By the end of this study, it will provide a method of how to investigate the interactions of individuals and how does their engagement in the online societies motivate their critical decisions in the real life.
We collected the timelines of Twitter users by using Twitter Stream API and Twitter REST API and then we critically analysed the collected data. We also explained the framework and the methodologies we follow to perform and represent our work and results. The initial settings and set of samples of both the data and the results will be included in detail. Also, an intensive literature review of the state-of-the-art is done to have a concrete background about how different approaches are used to perform such tasks. Finally, the initial findings will be published in a high ranked conference as a first step towards the PhD research.