Big Data, Social Media, and Protest: Foundations for a Research Agenda

Following the Arab Spring, a debate broke out among both academics and pundits as to how important social media had been in bringing about what may have been the least anticipated political development of the 21st century. Critics of the importance of social media pointed in particular to two factors: (a) the proportion of social media messages that were transmitted in English; and (b) the proportion of Arab Spring related social media posts that originated from outside the Arab world. In our chapter, we will test whether two important subsequent unanticipated protests Turkey’s 2013 Gezi Park protests and Ukraine’s 2013-14 Euromaidan protest also are susceptible to such criticisms. To do so, we draw on millions of tweets from both protests including millions of geolocated tweets from Turkey to test hypotheses related to the use of Twitter by protest participants and, more generally, in-country supporters of protest movements, effectively refuting the idea that emerged after the Arab Spring that Twitter use during protests only reflects international attention to an event. ∗The authors are all members of the New York University Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) laboratory. The writing of this article was supported by the INSPIRE program of the National Science Foundation (Award # SES-1248077) and Dean Thomas Carew and the Research Investment Fund (RIF) of New York University. 1 Online Appendix Figure A1: Turkish Facebook Activity Over Time