Upcoming Presentation: A Tale of Two Social Movements

This week I am headed to St. Pete Beach, Florida to the annual conference of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA). The Sunbelt Conference draws scholars from around the world; it is home to exciting research on the methods and application of social network analysis. I will be talking about a new research project, joint work with Andrés Monroy-Hernández at MSR. Talk abstract below.

Title: A Tale of Two Social Movements

Abstract: In this paper we investigate a new type of political protests characterized for their substantial presence on social media and their adoption of a distributed participation framework. Here, we focus on two core questions: (1) what are the roles of organizations and individuals over the course of the life of the protests? and (2) how do interactions among participating actors change as the protests grow and eventually dwindle? We examine these questions using as case studies the #YoSoy132 student uprising in Mexico, and the “bus rebellion”; in Brazil. Using a large-scale dataset of social interaction on Twitter, we identify key roles in the interaction structure over time. Preliminary results indicate that although individuals are prominent at the birth of the protests, these individuals fade as the movement dwindles and organizations take over. We also consider the dynamics of the interaction network, identifying key time points with unique social structure. We find that these time points often map to exogenous events such as coordinated protests in physical locations. Our results have important consequences for the visibility of such social movements as well as the ability of these movements to attract continued participation by both individual and organizational actors over time.

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