Mohamed Soufan

Mohamed Soufan

Linguistic uncertainty is common in social media, but its relationship with engagement remains unclear across languages and topics. Using 2,258 English-language posts on Federal Reserve policy, inflation, and electoral politics collected over three days in April 2026, we test whether the Uncertainty-Reply Asymmetry observed in prior Arabic-language research replicates in a broader context. Posts are classified using a lexicon-based uncertainty framework, with approximately one-third identified as uncertain. Uncertain posts receive 82% more replies on average than certain posts, with smaller increases in reposts and likes, replicating the asymmetric engagement pattern observed in prior work. Regression results confirm a positive and statistically significant association between uncertainty and replies (\b{eta} = 0.126, p = 0.011), equivalent to ~13% higher expected reply engagement, while total engagement shows a positive but weaker association. These findings suggest that linguistic uncertainty systematically increases conversational engagement and may reflect a general interactional mechanism across languages and domains.

Mohamed Soufan

This study examines the relationship between media coverage and public information demand during the Lebanon conflict in March 2026. Using a dataset of 11,623 English-language news articles collected from the GDELT database and Google Trends data for searches conducted within Lebanon, the study compares the distribution of news coverage across topics with the distribution of public search interest. News headlines were filtered for relevance and classified into four categories: Conflict, Economy, Living Conditions, and Emigration. Public information demand was measured using Google Trends topic data for the same categories. The results show a substantial divergence between news coverage and search interest. Conflict accounted for 94.9% of classified news coverage but only 36.9% of total search interest. In contrast, Economy, Living Conditions, and Emigration together accounted for 63.1% of search demand but only 5.1% of news coverage. Time series analysis indicates that search demand for economic and living conditions remained consistently elevated throughout the month rather than reacting to specific conflict events. These findings were robust to the exclusion of the peak conflict period (March 1-5), with Conflict coverage remaining at 94.9% and the information gap persisting across all three under-covered categories. The findings suggest that during the study period, media coverage of Lebanon was heavily concentrated on military events, while public information demand was distributed across economic conditions, daily life, and emigration. This study contributes to agenda-setting research by providing a quantitative comparison between media agenda and public information demand during an active conflict period.

Mohamed Soufan

Social media platforms play an increasingly important role in shaping political discussion and information flows. This study examines the structure of participation and attention in Arabic-language discourse about Hezbollah on X (formerly Twitter). Using a dataset of 15,767 tweets posted by 8,148 users between March 1 and March 8, 2026, the analysis investigates how engagement is distributed across participants and whether certain types of accounts play a disproportionate role in attracting attention. The results reveal a highly unequal distribution of engagement. Although thousands of users participate in the conversation, the top 1% of users capture 61.5% of all engagement, while the top 10% capture 96.2%. At the same time, most content is produced by non-media users, who account for 89.6% of users and 79.9% of tweets in the dataset. Accounts labeled as media, identified through media-related keywords in account metadata, receive higher engagement per tweet on average (41.32 interactions) than non-media users (30.84 interactions) and are overrepresented among the most engaged accounts. These findings indicate that while Hezbollah-related discourse on X appears broadly participatory in terms of posting activity, audience attention remains strongly concentrated among a small minority of highly visible accounts.