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Analyzing the impact of social media on social movements: a computational study on Twitter and the occupy wall street movement

Published: 25 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

The extensive use of digital social media by social movement actors is an emerging trend that restructures the communication dynamics of social protest, and it is widely credited with contributing to the successful mobilizations of recent movements (e.g., Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street). Yet, our understanding of both the roles played by social movement's use of social media and the extent of its impact is largely derived from anecdotal evidence, news reports, and a thin body of scholarly research on web-based technologies. In this research we explore several computational methods for measuring the impact of social media on a social movement. Inspired by methodologies originally developed for analyzing computer networks and other dynamic systems, these methods measure various static and dynamic aspects of social networks, and their relations to an underlying social movement. We demonstrated the feasibility and benefits of these measurement methods in the context of Twitter and the Occupying Wall Street movement (OWS). By analyzing tweets related to OWS, we demonstrated the link between the vitality of the movement and the volume of the related tweets over time. We show that there is a positive correlation between the dynamic of tweets and the short-term trend of OWS. The correlation makes it possible to forecast the short-term trend of a social movement using social media data. By ranking users based on the number of their OWS-related tweets and the durations of their tweeting, we are able to identify "buzz makers". Using a strategy similar to the page-rank algorithm, we define the influence of a user by the number of re-tweets that his/her original tweets incite. By tracing where OWS-related tweets are generated, we measure the geographic diffusion of OWS. By analyzing the percentage of OWS tweets generated from different sources, we show that smart phones and applications such as tweet deck had been used extensively for tweeting in the OWS movement. This indicates the involvement of a younger and more technology-inclined generation in OWS.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        ASONAM '13: Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining
        August 2013
        1558 pages
        ISBN:9781450322409
        DOI:10.1145/2492517
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Published: 25 August 2013

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        August 25 - 28, 2013
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        • (2022)Activism in the Digital AgeResearch Anthology on Social Media's Influence on Government, Politics, and Social Movements10.4018/978-1-6684-7472-3.ch001(1-24)Online publication date: 26-Aug-2022
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