6 of the Top 10 Stories from the Rio Olympics are About Muslim Women — Global Muslim Media Data & the Blind Spots in Data Research
Two years ago I founded Ummah Wide, a digital media startup focused on global Muslim youth culture. From our start we have been a media company beyond borders, reflective of the emerging generation of global Muslim youth. In starting this company we had a number of assumptions in launching a United States based Muslim-centric company with a global focus. Though this may seem illogical to those who don’t know the American Muslim population, Muslims in the US make up one of the single most diverse populations in the world.
Muslim communities also have unique global relationships related to family, friends, faith and business networks that tie us together in unique ways. Ummah Wide might be what was called in an earlier era of media “ethnic media,” but what we are seeing in its nascent stages today is what I call global diasporic digital media. Though newspapers and television networks are largely still tied to national boundaries, diasporic media is reflective of globally connected populations who live and have relationships and solidarities beyond borders.
There are a group of companies emerging in this space focused on Latino, African and African American, Asian, Indian, Chinese, European, Christian, Jewish and Muslim populations. More established media companies like Al Jazeera English, BuzzFeed, AJ+, SnapChat, and many others are clearly using this diasporic data to grow verticals focused on these communities. The Muslim community is one of the largest of these diasporic groups as an emerging global market that is expected to grow from one-fifth of humanity, to one-third of humanity between now and 2070. Another interesting aspect to this emerging population is the growth of the English language globally amongst Muslims.
What we have found in our research is that when there are positive stories focused on Muslim communities there is what we call a Muslim viral effect. There have been a number of examples like the story we launched in the Muslim community to rebuild Black churches burned down by White supremacists. Also stories such as the 1400 year old Qur’an discovered at the University of Birmingham in the UK, which was one of the most viewed stories on BBC in 2015. More recently we have the story about the Khan family taking on Donald Trump and the #CanYouHearUsNow campaign by Muslim women around the world.
In tracking Muslim media, and global diasporic media data we have turned to a number of emerging technologies including Alexa.com, Follow.net, MatterMark, BuzzSumo and Spike by NewsWhip. One of our favorite tools to use of this group is the Dublin, Ireland based company NewsWhip, which allows you to search social media interaction by topics, social media platforms, and websites. Using social media interaction from Facebook that includes: likes, comments, and shares you can see what is viral across social media by hour, day, week or over a month.
The Rio Olympics, the Muslim Viral Effect, and the Blind Spots of Western Data Scientists
As much of the world turns its attention to the Rio Olympics we have seen a number of viral stories emerge focused on Muslim athletes taking part in the games. So we looked with interest to see if any of these stories made it into NewsWhips recent blog article “The Top Content Trends of the Rio Olympics,” written by Grace Duffy.
The central part of the article features the top 10 Olympics stories on Facebook which you can see below.
As I read the article I began to doubt the data research based on the viral stories I had seen in my own networks related to the Olympics. I went to the source itself as I fired up NewsWhip and broadened the search terms to include: Simone Biles, Michael Phelps, Black Women, hijab, Ibtihaj Muhammad, weightlifting, Saudi Arabia, Mo Farah, and beach volleyball. These search terms proved me right, as they drastically changed the standings of the top 10 Olympics stories on Facebook.
The biggest Olympic story of them all that we have come across is rightfully about one of the stars of the Rio Olympics, with one of the most incredible stories of these games, Simone Biles. This story by the Independent Journal had more shares and interactions than all the other stories that made Spike’s top 10 combined— “Little Girl with Drug-Addicted Mother & Abandoned by Father is Adopted by Christian Grandparents, Becomes Best Athlete in the World,” which has as of this writing a social score of 783,500 over seven days.
There was a story about Michael Phelps that had over 200,000 shares, but since it was a fake story about how Poseidon is his father we decided not to include it. Below are the top 10 Olympics english language stories with our broadened search terms.
Only 3 of the articles featured on the NewsWhip article made it into our top 10, meaning that NewsWhip missed these top Olympic articles by not using a broad enough range of search terms. Only 2 of the articles we listed would have been outside the time frame that NewsWhip looked at from August 1st to the 11th. We looked from the beginning of the Olympics on August 1st until August 15th when we researched and published this article.
All ten of the articles that made our top 10 feature women, 8 of the 10 articles are about women of color, and 6 of the top 10 articles are about Muslim women.
There were a number of other stories focused on Muslims in the Olympics near the top 10, including this story about Mo Farah that made fun of the conservative London based newspaper, the Daily Mail.
This story from the Washington Post about a number of negative interactions between Israeli and Muslim athletes is likely reflective of the Jewish communities social media networks.
There were even more stories about Ibtihaj Muhammad with tons of shares.
Another story that grew in the early days of the Olympics was based on this viral photo of Doaa Elghobashy of Egypt and Kira Walkenhorst of Germany competing in the beach volleyball competition. The contrast of a hijab and bikini led towards cringe inducing titles like “Volleyball in a Hijab: Does This Picture Show a Culture Clash,” from the BBC which has over 40,000 shares. In fact 6 of the top 8 stories about beach volleyball were about this story.
So what does this all mean?
First, even if you study social media, something NewsWhip has built a company around, if you don’t follow diverse accounts and a diverse set of people in your own feeds, you may not know the full search terms to use. This can result in biased research that is not as diverse as the data sets reflective of global social media data. This is a huge problem within the tech community that is much more White than the diverse data sets available on the platforms technologists have built. Bias must be recognized related to data science for this data to be meaningful in our diverse world. I first saw these stories in my own news feeds and I knew to use the search terms because of who my network is and as a reflection of my global relationships beyond borders as a Muslim.
The Olympics act as a unique and important data set to research diasporic media and how diasporic viral effects impact media stories. It is also an interesting data set related to the Muslim community as the Olympics have never been held in a Muslim majority country, and compared to the 22% of humanity who are today Muslim, only a fraction of Olympic athletes are Muslims, with an even smaller fraction of medals won by Muslims (maybe 15–20 medals in total of the 1000 medals awarded so far). Yet still, stories about Muslim women have made up 6 of the top 10 stories of these Olympic games to date.
The data we have gathered here is important, because it shows what a diverse global readership is directly interested in reading and sharing. This data is also proof that a clear Muslim viral effect in the English language is emerging and media companies all need to think about hiring staff who understand how best to cover Muslim populations around the world. This data is important for legacy media companies whose staff’s are not reflective of the world these companies cover. What impact can this data have on Islamophobia in legacy media companies when Muslims make up one of the largest audiences in the English language?
