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Who is Listening to Your Fatwas? Social Network Analysis of Islamic Sites’ Audiences on Facebook
Abstract
This paper presents an empirical study on Islamic social network sites providing normative content for Muslim minorities living in a non-Muslim context, particularly in Western Europe. It analyses the Facebook audiences of these sites and explores their similarities, differences, and affinities via social network analysis. The paper introduces a new quantitative method, Normalized Social Distance, that calculates the distances between various social groups, based on the intentional stances as expressed by these groups members’ activities on social networks. The emergence of social media have introduced substantial innovation in both production and consumption of Islamic knowledge, where established traditional Muslim authorities compete for audiences with charismatic satellite preachers and Internet-based muftis. This is particularly relevant to European Muslim communities, where experiences of cultural displacement and negotiations on hybridity and authenticity are at the heart of contemporary life. At the same time, the rise of social media along with the progress in computational tools that can process massive amounts of data makes possible a fundamentally new approach for the study of human beings and society. This paper explores 80 Facebook sites providing specific ‘Islamic’ content to European Muslim minorities. By doing so, it analyzes publicly available data about more than 3,5 millions users of these sites via Normalized Social Distance (NSD). In a nutshell, NSD is a formally defined method calculating the distance between social groups, based on the intentional stances as expressed by these groups members activities on social network sites. The resulting number expresses how ‘far’ or ‘close’ are the audiences of various sites to each other. The method provides an opportunity for a distant reading of social media, enabling us to formally represent and analyze the structural aspects of ‘big social data’. The empirical evidence indicates that there exist several tightly connected clusters of Islamic sites on Facebook, whose audiences are significantly ‘close’ to each other and share similar intentional stances. The users located in these clusters share similar media content and rarely reach out to different clusters. Furthermore, the findings indicate that a specific content, particularly related to the coexistence between Islamic law and European legal systems, gains a significant prominence on social networks by the actions of relatively small, yet coherent and active, audiences of predominantly Salafi sites. This elevation then subsequently influences the ways mainstream media and politicians prepare and promote their content on social network sites, shaping the public debate on Islam in Europe.
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Europe
Sub Area
Information Technology/Computing