When folkloric geopolitical concerns prompt a conspiratorial ideation: the case of Egyptian tweeters Bacem A. Essam . Mostafa M. Aref . Fayrouz Fouad © Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract The cartography of danger has recently expanded to turn several hotspots worldwide. This proves true when it comes to the Middle East where military interventions escalate and internal conflicts leverage. Implicating on the folkloric perception of the real geostrategic threats, this paper uses linguistic cues to explore the conceptualization of geopolitical concerns in a large-scale corpus of Egyptian tweets (2012–2017). Results reveal that the Conspiratorial Ideation is widely enabled and ushered to relieve the increasing anxiety ad hoc the rapidly changing political scene in Egypt and the pan-region. There, America, Israel, Iran and Cyprus are defined as the outsider plotters where the reigning regimes are accused of conspiring against the Egyptians. The threatened Egyptian geostrategic territories are claimed to be Sinai, Tiran strait, Halayeb triangle and Mediterranean gas fields. The suggested plotting scenar- ios are bootstrapped and discussed. Keywords FrameNet · Linguistic cues · Conspiratorial ideation · Twitter · Geopolitics · Corpus-based studies · Slap of the century Introduction Geopolitical concerns in the Middle East are quite escalating recently. With the resultant anxiety and fear in mind, this paper aims at identifying the awareness and interpretation of the Egyptian tweeters for the contemporary geopolitical changes. Pooling data about geopolitical events is attainable at the folkloric level by consulting social media streams. During several crises, investigating the reactions and folkloric perception about global events, such as Hurricane Sandy and the Haiti Earthquake, were ne- gotiated using Twitter, as a social network, and bootstrapped mobile texts (Crawford and Finn 2015). Given that the contemporary threats circumvent the geopolitical architecture of the global order and shift focus from geostrategic centrality to multifocal- ity, several geopolitical hotspots are rendered especially within the Middle East. Such unexpected events have been linked to conflicting secondary disputes and benefits for the allies and enemies equally. To retrieve the potential Egyptian- oriented threats objectively, a corpus of the Egyptian tweets (2012–2017) is analyzed. The findings and results are then mapped and discussed. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-018- 9854-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. B. A. Essam (&) · M. M. Aref · F. Fouad Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt e-mail: literaryartrans@gmail.com M. M. Aref e-mail: mostafa.m.aref@gmail.com F. Fouad e-mail: fayrouzf@yahoo.com 123 GeoJournal https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-018-9854-7