From Quartz:
A map of connections between Twitter accounts responding to an UNWRA school bombing in July.
Gilad Lotan
One reason the views on the latest Israel-Hamas conflict are so polarized is that people on each side of the opinion divide get their news from different places. Few things illustrate this as well as the map above, compiled by Gilad Lotan, the chief data scientist at Betaworks, a New York startup incubator.+The map depicts Twitter accounts that tweeted about the Israeli shelling of a UN school in Beit Hanoun on July 24th. Palestinian sources said it killed some 15 people; Israel said it was a response to anti-tank fire from the school and that only one mortar landed in the schoolyard, which was empty at the time. Whatever the facts, it was one of several events that set off a firestorm of media coverage and tweets.+The Twitter accounts are arranged according to how many connections they share; the closer two accounts are, the more accounts they both follow. The bigger the circle, the more followers that account has. What emerges from this is distinct groupings: “pro-Palestinian” in green on the right; “pro-Israel” in blue on the left. Lotan has colored most of the international journalists and media outlets in gray; they clearly have more followers among the pro-Palestinian side. The dark blue group in the upper left are American conservatives and Tea-Party types, while the lighter blue are Israeli media outlets and blogs, and American Zionist figures.+The standout here is Ha’aretz, the left-wing Israeli newspaper. While closer to the pro-Israel side, it clearly has a lot of pro-Palestinian followers. It’s fair to say that readers of Ha’aretz’s English edition include the only groups of people from the two sides who are reading the same news....MORE
