Skip to main content

Uncovering Social Media Reaction Pattern to Protest Events: A Spatiotemporal Dynamics Perspective of Ferguson Unrest

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9471))

Abstract

Social platforms like Twitter play an important role in people’s participation in social events. Utilizing big social media data to uncover people’s reaction to social protests can shed lights on understanding the event progress and the attitudes of normal people. In this study, we aim to explore the use of Twitter during protests using Ferguson unrest as an example from multiple perspectives of space, time and content. We conduct an in-depth analysis to unpack the social media response and event dynamics from a spatiotemporal perspective and to evaluate the social media reaction through the integration of spatiotemporal tweeting behavior and tweet text. We propose to answer the following research questions. (1) What is the general spatiotemporal tweeting patterns across the US? (2) What is the spatiotemporal tweeting patterns in local St. Louis? (3) What are the reaction patterns in different US urban areas in space, time and content?

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Bastos, M.T., da Cunha Recuero, R., da Silva Zago, G.: Taking Tweets to the Streets: A Spatial Analysis of the Vinegar Protests in Brazil. First Monday 19(3) (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Breuer, A., Landman, T., Farquhar, D.: Social Media and Protest Mobilization: Evidence from the Tunisian Revolution. Democratization, 1–29 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Cha, M., Haddadi, H., Benevenuto, F., Gummadi, P.K.: Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy. ICWSM 10(10–17), 30 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Conover, M. D., Davis, C., Ferrara, E., McKelvey, K., Menczer, F., Flammini, A.: The Geospatial Characteristics of a Social Movement Communication Network. PloS One 8(3) (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Croitoru, A., Wayant, N., Crooks, A., Radzikowski, J., Stefanidis, A.: Linking Cyber and Physical Spaces through Community Detection and Clustering in Social Media Feeds. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Earl, J., McKee Hurwitz, H., Mejia Mesinas, A., Tolan, M., Arlotti, A.: This Protest will be Tweeted: Twitter and Protest Policing during the Pittsburgh G20. Information, Communication and Society 16(4), 459–478 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Fillion, R. M.: How Ferguson Protesters Use Social Media to Organize. The Wall Street Journal, November 24, 2014

    Google Scholar 

  8. Gaby, S., Caren, N.: Occupy Online: How Cute Old Men and Malcolm X Recruited 400,000 US Users to OWS on Facebook. Social Movement Studies 11(3–4), 367–374 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Garrett, R.K.: Protest in an Information Society: A Review of Literature on Social Movements and New ICTs. Information, Communication and Society 9(02), 202–224 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Giugni, M.: Social Protest and Policy Change: Ecology, Antinuclear, and Peace Movements in Comparative Perspective. Rowman and Littlefield (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Gonzlez-Bailn, S., Borge-Holthoefer, J., Rivero, A., Moreno, Y.: The Dynamics of Protest Recruitment through an Online Network. Scientific Reports 1 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Lotan, G., Graeff, E., Ananny, M., Gaffney, D., Pearce, I.: The Revolutions were Tweeted: Information Flows during the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions. International Journal of Communication 5, 31 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Morstatter, F., Pfeffer, J., Liu, H., Carley, K.M.: Is the sample good enough? Comparing data from twitter’s streaming API with twitter’s firehose. In: Seventh International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Poell, T., Borra, E.: Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr as Platforms of Alternative Journalism: The Social Media Account of the 2010 Toronto G20 Protests. Journalism 13(6), 695–713 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Shirky, C.: The Political Power of Social Media. Foreign Affairs 90(1), 28–41 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Tufekci, Z., Wilson, C.: Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political Protest: Observations from Tahir Square. Journal of Communication 62(2), 363–379 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Valenzuela, S.: Unpacking the Use of Social Media for Protest Behavior: the Roles of Information, Opinion Expression, and Activism. American Behavioral Scientist 57(7), 920–942 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Wu, S., Hofman, J. M., Mason, W. A., Watts, D. J.: Who says what to whom on twitter? In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 705–714 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Romero, D.M., Galuba, W., Asur, S., Huberman, B.A.: Influence and passivity in social media. In: Gunopulos, D., Hofmann, T., Malerba, D., Vazirgiannis, M. (eds.) ECML PKDD 2011, Part III. LNCS, vol. 6913, pp. 18–33. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jiaying He .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

He, J., Hong, L., Frias-Martinez, V., Torrens, P. (2015). Uncovering Social Media Reaction Pattern to Protest Events: A Spatiotemporal Dynamics Perspective of Ferguson Unrest. In: Liu, TY., Scollon, C., Zhu, W. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9471. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27433-1_5

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27433-1_5

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-27432-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-27433-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics