The torture and murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi shocked the world and is an unfortunate trending topic as proven by our analysis of The New York Times, one of the world’s most renowned morning daily newspapers known for its’ editorial excellence. Using CrowdTangle’s Intelligence analysis feature, we selected “all tweets” under the “post type” category, and “all interactions” under the “post interactions” category then grouped our data by day. The peaks on the graph below showed no consistency regarding which topic was trending as each represented a top tweet about a differed story from the rest.
However, the tweet with the most overall interactions represented by the highest peak was about a breaking news article link reporting newly found audio confirming the details of Jamal Khashoggi’s death.
Breaking News: Audio confirms Jamal Khashoggi was tortured and dismembered, a Turkish official said, revealing gruesome details and contradicting Saudi denials https://t.co/l0jH0qRRnE
— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 17, 2018
Further analysis of the graph’s data showed that similar tweets around this topic generally had high interactions proving it to be a trending topic.
Using Twitter Advanced Search, we entered Jamal Khashoggi and #jamalkhashoggi then applied this search Boolean to Tweetdeck, setting the engagement criteria to at least 200 likes and at least 100 retweets. We found that other noteworthy outlets have been covering this topic albeit from taking different angles e.g the BBC’s recent article about Khashoggi’s fiancé refusing Trump’s invitation to the White House. There is also a lot of outcry from both journalists and the public around the general lack of US response given Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s friendly visit to Saudi Arabia as well as President Trump’s initial support of Saudi officials. Furthermore, outrage over Saudi officials’ playing innocent has been circulating, with top journalists i.e. Ana Navarro and Tom Garra as well as human rights activists i.e. Fadi Al-Qadi sharing visual media of the King and Crown Prince offering condolences to Khashoggi’s son. Recent trending tweets around this topic have been posts of an ad from The Washington Post demanding for answers for Khashoggi’s murder, especially amongst the WP’s community, and a very recent video of journalists around the world reading Khashoggi’s last piece.
Monica Savanne
Emma Schambers
Emma Wishnow