Since March of 2011, Syria has been going through a Civil War that has created a humanitarian crisis, that has captured attention worldwide. According to the UN, approximately 400 thousand people have been killed and there are more than 4 million Syrian refugees.
In 2014, a resident and member of Aleppo Eyewitness News Network started a social media campaign with the hashtag #SaveAleppo. His goal was to make people aware about what was happening in Aleppo. Since the beginning of the war, there have been non-stop attacks towards civilians, killing thousands of people. The following image shows the latest tweets during the month of August that demonstrate the distress in Aleppo and people’s concerns about the war.
This tweet was the most re-tweeted one during August 2016. The tweet was related to airstrikes that were affecting Syria for the last three weeks of that month. At the moment, tweets were mostly mentioning how women and children were suffering and dying during the war .
The hashtag was mostly trending in the U.S. and in Eastern Europe. In the case of Eastern Europe, thousands of Syrian refugees are reaching their coasts trying to find a shelter. For this reason, people in these countries are closely related to the conflict. Meanwhile, news outlets in the U.S. started talking more about the conflict due to the fact that Barack Obama and Russia’s President conversation about the war was trending at the moment.
The top words, Aleppo and SaveAleppo, were directly related to the campaign and hashtag.
Http appears in the word cloud since most of the tweets were connected to articles that talk about the crisis.
According to the following BuzzGraph, the most related words to the hashtag #SaveAleppo were POTUS, Ricarddi, and Omran. POTUS is connected since the population was trying to push Obama to lead the humanitarian aid. Also, Andrea Ricarddi is an Italian activist who tries to help Syrian refugees. Lastly, Omran Daqneesh is the 5-year old kid who was saved from an attack in Aleppo and his picture went viral in Social Media.
He has a name… Omran. And he is being used to draw attention to a huge mess
Authors: Inbal Elazar, Natalie Markovits, Angelica Rodriguez