SOLIDARITY OR SCHISM: IDEOLOGICAL CONGRUENCE AND THE TWITTER NETWORKS OF EGYPTIAN ACTIVISTS*
Social movement scholarship on the role of coalitions in advancing social change claims that communication across ideological boundaries can foster a collective identity among diverse groups of activists. New communications technology, especially activists' widespread adoption of social media, calls into question whether these claims apply equally to online social media-based coalitions. Using the case of the Egyptian revolution in the Arab Spring, we conduct a series of social network analyses of the Twitter networks of activists. We find that social movement coalitions theory accurately predicts the conditions under which coalitions form and dissolve for online activists, as it does for on-the-ground activists. Among activists of diverse ideologies, we identify a pattern of solidarity in the early days of the revolutionary period, followed by a period of schism after a military crackdown on protestors. This research extends social movement theory to the sphere of digital activism.
Contributor Notes
* Direct correspondence to Deena Abul-Fottouh, Department of Sociology, McMaster University, Kenneth Taylor Hall, KTH 627, 1280 Main St. West, Hamilton, ON Canada L8S 4M4, d.abulfottouh@gmail.com.
† The authors thank Melanie Heath and Paul Glavin, McMaster University, Mark Stoddart, Memorial University of Newfoundland, and Peter Carrington, University of Waterloo for their careful reading and helpful feedback on previous versions of this article. In addition, many thanks to Neal Caren and the anonymous reviewers, whose suggestions improved our manuscript greatly. Thanks also to coders, who contributed to the coding of ideological identities of activists and groups. For their safety, we will not name them here. This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship for Dr. Abul-Fottouh.