Nakba Discourse 2025: A Bilingual Social Media Dataset for Collective Trauma Analysis

Wajdi Zaghouani, Mabrouka Bessghaier, Kais Attia


Abstract
We introduce Nakba Discourse 2025, a bilingual full-year social media dataset capturing Arabic and English discourse about the 1948 Palestinian Nakba across Twitter/X and Facebook from January to December 2025. The corpus contains 70,312 unique posts organized into intersecting sub-corpora by language, sentiment, gender, geography, and platform, with engagement metadata and automatically extracted rhetorical features. Analyses reveal systematic variation in engagement and framing across communities. Per-post engagement is highest in Israel and UK subsets (50.62 and 49.08 average likes respectively), while Arabic-language discourse shows markedly lower per-post engagement. Sentiment distribution is strongly skewed, with negative sentiment posts outnumbering positive ones at an 11:1 ratio (54,424 vs. 4,827 posts). Despite dramatic variation in absolute engagement levels, virality rates remain structurally constant at approximately 10% across all Twitter/X sub-corpora, regardless of language, gender, or geography, pointing to platform-level amplification regularities. Gender analysis reveals that women achieve proportional virality equal to men despite producing roughly one-third the volume of posts. Temporal patterns align with cultural calendars, including Thursday peaks associated with Jumu’ah across Arabic and female subsets, and Sunday peaks in English-language subsets reflecting Western media cycles. The dataset will be released for research use and supports multilingual stance detection, virality modeling, rhetorical analysis, and computational studies of digital political memory.
Anthology ID:
2026.nakbanlp-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Nakba Narratives as Language Resources @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Mustafa Jarrar, Mo El-Haj, Amal Haddad, Serin Atiani, Shadi Abudalfa, Terry Regier, Paul Rayson, Khalil Sima’an, Camille Mansour
Venues:
NakbaNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
33–42
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-nakbanlp-03
DOI:
10.63317/26i8wdd5eyrt
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wajdi Zaghouani, Mabrouka Bessghaier, and Kais Attia. 2026. Nakba Discourse 2025: A Bilingual Social Media Dataset for Collective Trauma Analysis. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Nakba Narratives as Language Resources @ LREC 2026, pages 33–42, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Nakba Discourse 2025: A Bilingual Social Media Dataset for Collective Trauma Analysis (Zaghouani et al., NakbaNLP 2026)
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