Sectarianism and the Arab Spring: Framing the popular protests in Bahrain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Inspired by the events of the Arab Spring, political activists in Bahrain organized an anti-government demonstration on 14 February 2011, which resulted in the death of one protestor. Hundreds of other protests followed, and popular anger against the Sunni monarchy is still a vital issue in the Kingdom. From the earliest stages, the Bahraini government, which is closely aided by other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, framed the protests as an Iran-backed conspiracy against the Gulf in an attempt to spread Shiism and infiltrate into the region. This sectarian dimension became the dominant frame in order to discredit the cause of the mostly Shiite protestors who were asking for equal rights and job opportunities. This study investigates the different issues and sentiments framed by the commentators as well as the main online communities that were present. Despite its importance in providing a vital venue for the online public sphere and in documenting popular protests, YouTube is also a platform for schism as flaming and highly sectarian exchanges of comments are frequently made.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".