Tents, Tweets, and Events: The Interplay Between Ongoing Protests and Social Media

Marco T. Bastos, Dan Mercea and Arthur Charpentier
Additional contact information
Marco T. Bastos: UC Davis - University of California [Davis] - UC - University of California
Dan Mercea: City University London

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Recent protests have fuelled deliberations about the extent to which social media ignites popular uprisings. In this paper we use time-series data of Twitter, Facebook, and onsite protests to assess the Granger-causality between social media streams and onsite developments at the Indignados, Occupy, and Brazilian Vinegar protests. After applying a Gaussianization procedure to the data, we found that contentious communication on Twitter and Facebook forecasted onsite protest during the Indignados and Occupy protests, with bidirectional Granger-causality between online and onsite protest in the Occupy series. Conversely, the Vinegar demonstrations presented Granger-causality between Facebook and Twitter communication, and separately between protestors and injuries/arrests onsite. We conclude that the effective forecasting of protest activity likely varies across different instances of political unrest.

Keywords: Social Media; contentious politics; granger causality test; occupy; indignados; vinegar protests (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-04
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published in Journal of Communication, 2015, 65 (2), pp.320-350. ⟨10.1111/jcom.12145⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-01241882

DOI: 10.1111/jcom.12145

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().