Beyond religious texts: discussion of zakat on social media

This chapter goes beyond traditional discourse based on religious texts to better understand everyday Muslims’ approach to philanthropy by looking at discussions of zakat over Twitter. Research demonstrates that social media can be crucial in creating new and dissenting voices and collective action in the Muslim world and elsewhere. We collected 100,000 tweets from Twitter and used a structural topical model (STM), an unsupervised machine learning model, to study the main topics around which Twitter users discuss zakat. Overall, discussions of zakat, like mainstream philanthropy, often focus on its potential in how it will benefit both the receiver and the giver as it helps improve both the religious and moral standing of the giver while also helping the receiver. However, despite its potential, some users worry about the misuse of zakat and its use in corruption and promoting certain extremist groups.