From Cairo to Cape Town: How African Twitter Shapes the Global Palestine-Israel Narrative
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Building Educational Applications Using NLP
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.