Political tweeting: The impact of social media on the political awareness of saudi women

Abstract

Altuwayjiri aims to examine the reasons behind the recent development and radical changes in Saudi women’s relations to politics, in what has come to be known as the golden age for women in Saudi Arabia. This chapter identifies social media networks as a key enabler for women’s political engagement. It critically examines and debates the role that these networks, in particular Twitter, play in raising Saudi women’s political awareness and in encouraging them to become more informed about current events. The findings show the use of Twitter by Saudi women as a news medium, but most importantly as a virtual, feminized, political public sphere where they can self-express and demand their rights, while compensating for their exclusion from the actual physical political public sphere.