Measuring social unrest using media reports

Forecasting Social Unrest Using Activity Cascades

Social unrest is endemic in many societies, and recent news has drawn attention to happenings in Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Civilian populations mobilize, sometimes spontaneously and sometimes in an organized manner, to raise awareness of key issues or to demand changes in governing or other organizational structures. It is of key interest to social scientists and polic...

Social Media Censorship in Times of Political Unrest: A Social Simulation Experiment with the UK Riots

Following the 2011 wave of political unrest, extending from the Arab Spring to the UK riots, the formation of a large consensus around Internet censorship is underway. The present paper adopts a social simulation approach to show that the decision to “regulate”, filter or censor social media in situations of unrest changes the pattern of civil protest and ultimately results in higher levels of ...

Towards Measuring Fine-Grained Diversity Using Social Media Photographs

Diversity is an important socio-economic construct that influences multiple aspects of human lives from the prosperity of a city to corporate earnings and from criminal justice to health and social engagement. Large, heavily populated urban areas can be highly diverse at the city or even neighborhood level, but we know very little about how much people from diverse demographics (such as age and...

Measuring User Credibility in Social Media

People increasingly use social media to get first-hand news and information. During disasters such as Hurricane Sandy and the tsunami in Japan people used social media to report injuries as well as send out their requests. During social movements such as Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the Arab Spring, people extensively used social media to organize their events and spread the news. As more peopl...

Measuring international relations in social media conversations