Western News and Social Media Websites Broker Information for Iraq’s Political Web

The political and security situation in Iraq is a frequent topic for international news coverage. Despite these challenges, Iraq’s political parties and have built a vibrant online public sphere. Surprisingly, Western media and social networking applications are key brokers for political news and information for Iraq’s online political discourse. ^PITPI researchers investigated these and other issues by crawling Iraq’s online political landscape. Below is a graphical illustration of the findings:

Web pages of the BBC, CNN, the Guardian, and Reuters were highly-linked nodes in Iraq’s online political landscape. These Western media outlets were ranked even higher than the regional Al Jazeera, and social media sites such as YouTube, Wikipedia, and BlogSpot were also well represented, perhaps for strategic reasons. For the full analysis click [here] to read the complete data memo.

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