@inproceedings{fawzi-etal-2026-cairo,
title = "From Cairo to Cape Town: How {A}frican {T}witter Shapes the Global {P}alestine-{I}srael Narrative",
author = "Fawzi, Mahmoud and
Elmimouni, Houda and
Magdy, Walid",
editor = "Afli, Haithem and
Bouamor, Houda and
Zaghouani, Wajdi and
Ghannay, Sahar and
Hossain, Shehenaz",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Political Sciences ({P}olitical{NLP} 2026)",
month = may,
year = "2026",
address = "Palma, Mallorca (Spain)",
publisher = "ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.politicalnlp-1.3/",
doi = "10.63317/3yjem8toy98z",
pages = "29--34",
abstract = "African Twitter users are active shapers of the Palestine-Israel conversation but their contribution remains relatively understudied. Using 132.5K geo-located tweets from 2020 to 2023 and 451-term list of keywords in 33 languages, we identify three patterns in this context: (1) broad participation (Egypt supplies 43{\%} of posts, yet Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya and Ghana contribute more than a third); (2) multilingual predominantly pro-Palestine amplification across Arabic, English, French, Swahili and other tongues, with 8{\%} of tweets left ``undetermined'' by Twitter{'}s language detector; and (3) a humanitarian framing that centers civilian harm through hashtags such as {\#}GazaUnderAttack and {\#}PalestenianLivesMatter. We outline design implications for language-agnostic interfaces, low-friction source verification and cross-movement recommendation tools that foreground African epistemologies in global civic-tech systems."
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<abstract>African Twitter users are active shapers of the Palestine-Israel conversation but their contribution remains relatively understudied. Using 132.5K geo-located tweets from 2020 to 2023 and 451-term list of keywords in 33 languages, we identify three patterns in this context: (1) broad participation (Egypt supplies 43% of posts, yet Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya and Ghana contribute more than a third); (2) multilingual predominantly pro-Palestine amplification across Arabic, English, French, Swahili and other tongues, with 8% of tweets left “undetermined” by Twitter’s language detector; and (3) a humanitarian framing that centers civilian harm through hashtags such as #GazaUnderAttack and #PalestenianLivesMatter. We outline design implications for language-agnostic interfaces, low-friction source verification and cross-movement recommendation tools that foreground African epistemologies in global civic-tech systems.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T From Cairo to Cape Town: How African Twitter Shapes the Global Palestine-Israel Narrative
%A Fawzi, Mahmoud
%A Elmimouni, Houda
%A Magdy, Walid
%Y Afli, Haithem
%Y Bouamor, Houda
%Y Zaghouani, Wajdi
%Y Ghannay, Sahar
%Y Hossain, Shehenaz
%S Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Political Sciences (PoliticalNLP 2026)
%D 2026
%8 May
%I ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
%C Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
%F fawzi-etal-2026-cairo
%X African Twitter users are active shapers of the Palestine-Israel conversation but their contribution remains relatively understudied. Using 132.5K geo-located tweets from 2020 to 2023 and 451-term list of keywords in 33 languages, we identify three patterns in this context: (1) broad participation (Egypt supplies 43% of posts, yet Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya and Ghana contribute more than a third); (2) multilingual predominantly pro-Palestine amplification across Arabic, English, French, Swahili and other tongues, with 8% of tweets left “undetermined” by Twitter’s language detector; and (3) a humanitarian framing that centers civilian harm through hashtags such as #GazaUnderAttack and #PalestenianLivesMatter. We outline design implications for language-agnostic interfaces, low-friction source verification and cross-movement recommendation tools that foreground African epistemologies in global civic-tech systems.
%R 10.63317/3yjem8toy98z
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.politicalnlp-1.3/
%U https://doi.org/10.63317/3yjem8toy98z
%P 29-34
Markdown (Informal)
[From Cairo to Cape Town: How African Twitter Shapes the Global Palestine-Israel Narrative](https://aclanthology.org/2026.politicalnlp-1.3/) (Fawzi et al., PoliticalNLP 2026)
ACL