BEIRUT: While ISIS grabs headlines amid mounting fears that the extremist group, which bases its media campaign on social media, will gain ground in Lebanon, the country's "most shared" Facebook post in 2014 focused on a major traditional concern: Palestine.
Lebanese Blogs, a website that aggregates posts from Lebanon's most popular bloggers, some 364, reported that the most shared post on Facebook was one first posted by Hummus for Thought titled "What did Palestine look like in 1869?"
The video, which was shared 93,961 times, was originally posted by LobsterFilms.com, a website archiving rare and unknown films. The nearly 3-minute video shows black-and-white footage of Palestine with a narrator spotting a veiled woman, an Orthodox Jew and an Armenian bishop. It highlights the state of co-existence in Palestine at the end of the 19 century, particularly in Jerusalem, which today is the site of repeated, bloody clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police.
While the most-shared was a thoughtful look at co-existence, the second most-shared post was about what type of shoes men should have, with 52,902 shares, and the third most-shared was a CNN story about Beirut being the No. 1 city in the world to invest, a different perspective contrary to CNN’s 2010 story that Beirut was among the top five most dangerous cities.
A rumored wedding in Lebanon for George Clooney and Lebanese-born Amal Alamuddin was the seventh most shared post on Facebook and the biggest rumor this year.
The only political story in the top 20 list on Facebook was a post by Moulahazat blog titled “When warlords become presidential candidates.”
The Palestine video was also Lebanon's most shared post on Twitter with 1,808 tweets. The second was by satirical blogger Karl Remarks: "We Give the Scottish Independence Referendum the Middle East Expert Treatment."
The third on Twitter was a post by A Separate State of Mind on assailants who torched a historic library in the northern city of Tripoli owned by a Greek Orthodox priest. At least 50,000 rare books and manuscripts were damaged in the fire, which was reportedly in retaliation to a rumored article that the protest had published online insulting Islam and the Prophet Mohammad.
Lebanese Twitter users had more of a regional dimension with various stories on Egypt and Syria being among the most shared.
Lebanon's most viral blogger this year was Karl Remarks, while cartoonist Ink on the Side came in second place and Blog of the Boss third. Virality, according to Lebanese Blogs, is a measure of how well the blog is doing on social media.
The most prolific blogger, with more than 1,557 blog posts in 2014, was Blog Baladi, averaging four posts a day. The second most prolific was a restaurant review blog by Anthony Rahayel, No Garlic No Onions.
Blog of the Year was awarded to Ink on the Side, run by Sareen Akarjalian. Lebanese Blogs define “Blog of the Year” as the blog whose posts that have the highest probability of becoming No. 1 on the website.
When it comes to social media and reading articles online, Lebanese seem to divert away from the mundane political arena and be more involved in human interest stories and blog posts that ridicule the country’s depressing situation.
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