Detecting Mass Protest through Social Media
Keywords:
social media, networks, Twitter, Ukraine, protest, EuromaidanAbstract
Building on the existing understanding of the dynamics of mass protest, this paper argues that social media data can be used to detect the occurrence of such protests. It outlines a theoretical framework arguing that during times of mass mobilization, network central actors will geographically converge upon city centers, and that the relative magnitudes of social media activity in the center and periphery of the state can be used to detect the occurrence of protests. This article presents a new dataset of 2.2 million geocoded Ukrainian tweets, which are used to empirically test the theory against the observed 2014 Euromaidan protests in Ukraine. By relying completely on count and network data rather than keywords, hashtags, or other contextual clues from the content, this technique is portable across language barriers and national borders.
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Vis, F. (2013). Twitter as a reporting tool for breaking news: Journalists tweeting the 2011 UK riots. Digital Journalism, 1(1), 27-47.
Wilson, S. L. (2016a). Information and revolution (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. (No. 10155683)
Wilson, S. L. (2016b). The Geocoded Twitter Archive for the Social Sciences: A New Dataset. Tech. rep.
Wojcieszak, M. E., & Mutz, D. C. (2009). Online groups and political discourse: Do online discussion spaces facilitate exposure to political disagreement?. Journal of Communication, 59(1), 40-56.
Zhuo, X., Wellman, B., & Yu, J. (2011). Egypt: The first Internet revolt? Peace Magazine, (Jul/Sep), 6–10.
Anderson, L. (2011). Demystifying the Arab Spring. Foreign Affairs, 90(2), 2–7.
Baker, S. A. (2012). From the criminal crowd to the “mediated crowd”: the impact of social media on the 2011 English riots. Safer Communities, 11(1), 40-49.
BBC News. (2014, February 19). Ukraine crisis: Police storm main Kiev 'Maidan' protest camp. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26249330.
Becker, H., Naaman, M., & Gravano, L. (2010, February). Learning similarity metrics for event identification in social media. In Proceedings of the third ACM international conference on Web search and data mining (pp. 291-300). ACM.
Boschee, E., Lautenschlager, J., O'Brien, S., Shellman, S., Starz, J., & Ward, M. (2015). ICEWS Coded Event Data. Harvard Dataverse, V12.
Bunce, V. J., & Wolchik, S. L. (2010). Defeating dictators: Electoral change and stability in competitive authoritarian regimes. World Politics, 62(1), 43-86.
Castells, M. (2009). Rise of the Network Society, with a new preface: The Information Age: Economy, society, and culture Volume I. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
Chae, J., Thom, D., Bosch, H., Jang, Y., Maciejewski, R., Ebert, D. S., & Ertl, T. (2012, October). Spatiotemporal social media analytics for abnormal event detection and examination using seasonal-trend decomposition. In Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), 2012 IEEE Conference on (pp. 143-152). IEEE.
Chowdhury, M. (2008). The Role of the Internet in Burma’s Saffron Revolution. Harvard University, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 8. Retrieved from https://cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2008/Role_of_the_Internet_in_Burmas_Saffron_Revolution
Denef, S., Bayerl, P. S., & Kaptein, N. A. (2013, April). Social media and the police: Tweeting practices of British police forces during the August 2011 riots. In proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 3471-3480). ACM.
Diamond, L. (2010). Liberation technology. Journal of Democracy, 21(3), 69–83.
Dyczok, M. (2005). Breaking through the information blockade: Election and revolution in Ukraine 2004. Canadian Slavonic Papers, 47(3-4), 241-264.
Faris, R., & Etling, B. (2008). Madison and the smart mob: The promise and limitations of the Internet for Democracy. Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, 32, 65.
Farrell, H. (2012). The consequences of the Internet for politics. Annual Review of Political Science, 15(1), 35–52.
Gentzkow, M., & Shapiro, J. M. (2011). Ideological segregation online and offline. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 126(4), 1799-1839.
Glasgow, K., & Fink, C. (2013, April). Hashtag lifespan and social networks during the London riots. In A. M. Greenberg, W. G. Kennedy, & N. D. Bos (Eds.) International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction (pp. 311-320). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Goldstein, J. (2007). The role of digital networked technologies in the Ukrainian Orange Revolution. In Berkman Center Research Publication, 14. Retrieved from https://cyber.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.harvard.edu/files/Goldstein_Ukraine_2007.pdf
Hofheinz, A. (2005). The Internet in the Arab world: Playground for political liberalization. International Politics and Society, 3(1), 78-96.
Kyj, M. J. (2006). Internet use in Ukraine's Orange Revolution. Business Horizons, 49(1), 71-80.
Mackell, A. (2011, May 25). The IMF versus the Arab spring. The Guardian, Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com
Morozov, E. (2012). The Net delusion: The dark side of Internet freedom. PublicAffairs.
Murphy, E. C. (2006). Agency and space: The political impact of information technologies in the Gulf Arab states. Third World Quarterly, 27(6), 1059-1083.
Oghia, M. J., & Indelicato, H. (2011). Ruling the Arab internet: an analysis of internet ownership trends of six Arab countries. Arab Media & Society, Summer, 14.
Page, S. E. (2008). The difference: How the power of diversity creates better groups, firms, schools, and societies. Princeton University Press.
Panagiotopoulos, P., Bigdeli, A. Z., & Sams, S. (2014). Citizen–government collaboration on social media: The case of Twitter in the 2011 riots in England. Government Information Quarterly, 31(3), 349-357.
Pohl, D., Bouchachia, A., & Hellwagner, H. (2012, April). Automatic sub-event detection in emergency management using social media. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web (pp. 683-686). ACM.
Procter, R., Vis, F., & Voss, A. (2013). Reading the riots on Twitter: methodological innovation for the analysis of big data. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 16(3), 197-214.
R Core Team (2017). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL http://www.R-project.org/.
Ramakrishnan, N., Butler, P., Muthiah, S., Self, N., Khandpur, R., Saraf, P., et al. (2014, August). 'Beating the news' with EMBERS: Forecasting civil unrest using open source indicators. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 1799-1808). ACM.
Sabadello, M. (2012). The Role of New Media for the Democratization Processes in the Arab World. In Z. Sereghy, S. Bunk, & B. Preiss (Eds.), The Arab Revolutions: Reflections on the role of civil society, human rights and new media in the transformation processes. Austrian Study Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution.
Schussman, A., & Soule, S. A. (2005). Process and protest: Accounting for individual protest participation. Social Forces, 84(2), 1083-1108.
Shirky, C. (2009). Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. New York: Penguin.
Stepanova, E. (2011). The role of information communication technologies in the “Arab Spring”. Ponars Eurasia, 15, 1-6.
Sundberg, R., & Melander, E. (2013). Introducing the UCDP georeferenced event dataset. Journal of Peace Research, 50(4), 523-532.
Sunstein, C. R. (2009). Republic.com 2.0. Princeton University Press.
Tonkin, E., Pfeiffer, H. D., & Tourte, G. (2012). Twitter, information sharing and the London riots?. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 38(2), 49-57.
Tucker, J., Barberá, P., & Metzger, M. (2013). A breakout role for Twitter? Extensive use of social media in the absence of traditional media by Turks in Turkish in Taksim Square protests. The Monkey Cage [blog]. Retrieved from http://themonkeycage.org/2013/06/a-breakout-role-for-twitter-extensive-use-of-social-media-in-the-absence-of-traditional-media-by-turks-in-turkish-in-taksim-square-protests/
Tufekci, Z., & Wilson, C. (2012). Social media and the decision to participate in political protest: Observations from Tahrir Square. Journal of Communication, 62(2), 363-379.
van Zoonen, W., & van der Meer, T. G. L. A. (2016). Social media research: The application of supervised machine learning in organizational communication research. Computers in Human Behavior, 63, 132-141.
Vis, F. (2013). Twitter as a reporting tool for breaking news: Journalists tweeting the 2011 UK riots. Digital Journalism, 1(1), 27-47.
Wilson, S. L. (2016a). Information and revolution (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. (No. 10155683)
Wilson, S. L. (2016b). The Geocoded Twitter Archive for the Social Sciences: A New Dataset. Tech. rep.
Wojcieszak, M. E., & Mutz, D. C. (2009). Online groups and political discourse: Do online discussion spaces facilitate exposure to political disagreement?. Journal of Communication, 59(1), 40-56.
Zhuo, X., Wellman, B., & Yu, J. (2011). Egypt: The first Internet revolt? Peace Magazine, (Jul/Sep), 6–10.
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