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Online Collective Action pp 179–195Cite as

The Strength of Tweet Ties

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Social Networks ((LNSN))

Abstract

While in 2011 protesters took to the streets and gathered in Tahrir Square in Cairo, people in Egypt and across the world started discussing the protests on Twitter. With its short and simple messages, Twitter turned out to be an effective venue for diffusion of ideas and opinions. This chapter explores how social movements and other forms of collective action may be able to use Twitter to frame grievances in ways that resonate with their target audience. In particular, using Twitter data collected during the protests in Egypt, this paper examines whether the use of Twitter by Egyptian activists helped to diffuse the Arab Spring frame across Egypt and generate greater social cohesion around their messages. Our results lend tentative support to the hypothesis that it in fact did. When activists or members of the traditional media are in positions of brokerage, the level of cohesion within a community is greater than it would be otherwise. That highly central activists have the largest effect suggests that because their position within the network allows them to broker the flow of information, they are able to use Twitter to frame events in ways that resonate with others.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Tahrir Square is a major public square in downtown Cairo. It is formerly the site of British barracks, and after the British left Egypt in 1949, King Farouk raised the Egyptian flag and renamed the square Tahrir “Liberation” square. It has also been the site of numerous protests and marches prior to the ones in January 2011 (International Crisis Group 2011).

  2. 2.

    For more information on the Egyptian demonstrations, see International Crisis Group (2011).

  3. 3.

    The combination of these factors does not guarantee that a social movement will emerge, however.

  4. 4.

    Given the 140 character limitation of Twitter messages (see discussion below), Twitter appears to be an ideal tool for the broadcasting of ideological snippets and the framing of grievances to a budding social movement’s target audience.

  5. 5.

    See http://www.twitter.com/about.

  6. 6.

    A “tweet” is a message that is limited to 140 characters or less.

  7. 7.

    Twitter tracks phrases, words, and phrases in order to find topics that become popular quickly and label as trending topics; these are published on its website and platform.

  8. 8.

    Twitter’s real-time capability has helped it be used in response to natural disasters both in the United States (Sutton et al. 2008) and abroad (Acar and Muraki 2011), response to acts of terrorism (Stelter and Cohen 2008), and for reactions to political debates (Shamma et al. 2009).

  9. 9.

    After officials declared incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner, supporters of opposition candidate Mir-Hussein Mousavi took to the streets to protest what they saw as a rigged election.

  10. 10.

    See http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928026.100-the-internet-is-a-tyrants-friend.html.

  11. 11.

    The triadic census was estimated using the social network analysis program, Pajek (Batagelj and Mrvar 2012; de Nooy et al. 2005, 2011).

  12. 12.

    Georg Simmel (1950) famously asserted that the triad is smallest irreducible unit of sociological analysis.

  13. 13.

    For a full description of all possible triad types, see de Nooy et al. (2005: 209).

  14. 14.

    We estimated the model using the generalized linear model (GLM) function implemented in StataCorp (2011), using a command by Hardin and Hilbe (2012), modifying the α so that the dispersion statistic was as close to 1.0 as possible.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, USA

    Rob Schroeder, Sean F. Everton & Russell Shepherd

Authors
  1. Rob Schroeder
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  2. Sean F. Everton
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  3. Russell Shepherd
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rob Schroeder .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Science, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

    Nitin Agarwal

  2. School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Merlyna Lim

  3. Departments of Information Science and Business Information Systems, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, USA

    Rolf T. Wigand

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Schroeder, R., Everton, S.F., Shepherd, R. (2014). The Strength of Tweet Ties. In: Agarwal, N., Lim, M., Wigand, R. (eds) Online Collective Action. Lecture Notes in Social Networks. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-1340-0_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-1340-0_10

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