Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a decentralized social movement protesting violence against Black individuals and communities, with a focus on police brutality. The movement gained significant attention following the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd in 2020. The #BlackLivesMatter social media hashtag has come to represent the grassroots movement, with similar hashtags counter protesting the BLM movement, such as #AllLivesMatter, and #BlueLivesMatter. We introduce a data set of 63.9 million tweets from 13.0 million users from over 100 countries which contain one of the following keywords: BlackLivesMatter, AllLivesMatter, and BlueLivesMatter. This data set contains all currently available tweets from the beginning of the BLM movement in 2013 to 2021. We summarize the data set and show temporal trends in use of both the BlackLivesMatter keyword and keywords associated with counter movements. Additionally, for each keyword, we create and release a set of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topics (i.e., automatically clustered groups of semantically co-occuring words) to aid researchers in identifying linguistic patterns across the three keywords.
Since the shooting of Black teenager Michael Brown by White police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, the protest hashtag #BlackLivesMatter has amplified critiques of extrajudicial killings of Black Americans. In response to #BlackLivesMatter, other Twitter users have adopted #AllLivesMatter, a counter-protest hashtag whose content argues that equal attention should be given to all lives regardless of race. Through a multi-level analysis of over 860,000 tweets, we study how these protests and counter-protests diverge by quantifying aspects of their discourse. We find that #AllLivesMa…
After George Floyd's death in May 2020, the volume of discussion in social media increased dramatically. A series of protests followed this tragic event, called as the 2020 BlackLivesMatter movement. Eventually, many user accounts are deleted by their owners or suspended due to violating the rules of social media platforms. In this study, we analyze what happened in Twitter before and after the event triggers with respect to deleted and suspended users. We create a novel dataset that includes approximately 500k users sharing 20m tweets, half of whom actively participated in the 2020 BlackLives…
Malaviya National Institute of Technology Jaipur（马拉维亚国家理工学院斋浦尔）
Riots and protests, if gone out of control, can cause havoc in a country. We have seen examples of this, such as the BLM movement, climate strikes, CAA Movement, and many more, which caused disruption to a large extent. Our motive behind creating this dataset was to use it to develop machine learning systems that can give its users insight into the trending events going on and alert them about the events that could lead to disruption in the nation. If any event starts going out of control, it can be handled and mitigated by monitoring it before the matter escalates. This dataset collects tweet…
The right to protest is perceived as one of the primary civil rights. Citizens participate in mass demonstrations to express themselves and exercise their democratic rights. However, because of the large number of participants, protests may lead to violence and destruction, and hence can be costly. Thus, it is important to predict such demonstrations in advance to safeguard against such damages. Recent research has shown that about 75 percent of protests that are regarded as legal, are planned in advance. Twitter, the prominent micro-blogging website, has been used as a tool by protestors for …
What are People Talking about in #BlackLivesMatter and #StopAsianHate? Exploring and Categorizing Twitter Topics Emerging in Online Social Movements through the Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model
Duke Kunshan University（杜克-昆山大学）；Data Science Research Center（数据科学研究中心）；Social Science Division Duke Kunshan University（社会科学系杜克-昆山大学）
The debates on minority issues are often dominated by or held among the concerned minority: gender equality debates have often failed to engage men, while those about race fail to effectively engage the dominant group. To test this observation, we study the #BlackLivesMatter}movement and hashtag on Twitter--which has emerged and gained traction after a series of events typically involving the death of African-Americans as a result of police brutality--and aim to quantify the population biases across user types (individuals vs. organizations), and (for individuals) across various demographics f…
A tweet from popular entertainer and businesswoman, Rihanna, bringing attention to farmers' protests around Delhi set off heightened activity on Indian social media. An immediate consequence was the weighing in by Indian politicians, entertainers, media and other influencers on the issue. In this paper, we use data from Twitter and an archive of debunked misinformation stories to understand some of the patterns around influencer engagement with a political issue. We found that more followed influencers were less likely to come out in support of the tweet. We also find that the later engagement…
Research across different disciplines has documented the expanding polarization in social media. However, much of it focused on the US political system or its culturally controversial topics. In this work, we explore polarization on Twitter in a different context, namely the protest that paralyzed several countries in the South American region in 2019. By leveraging users' endorsement of politicians' tweets and hashtag campaigns with defined stances towards the protest (for or against), we construct a weakly labeled stance dataset with millions of users. We explore polarization in two related …
2018 started with massive protests in Iran, bringing back the impressions of the so called "Arab Spring" and it's revolutionary impact for the Maghreb states, Syria and Egypt. Many reports and scientific examinations considered online social networks (OSN's) such as Twitter or Facebook to play a critical role in the opinion making of people behind those protests. Beside that, there is also evidence for directed manipulation of opinion with the help of social bots and fake accounts. So, it is obvious to ask, if there is an attempt to manipulate the opinion-making process related to the Iranian …
Using social media data -specially twitter -of the Chilean 2011-12 student movement, we study their social network evolution over time to analyze how leaders and participants self-organize and spread information. Based on a few key events of the student movement's timeline, we visualize the student network trajectory and analyze their structural and semantic properties. Therefore, in this paper we: i) describe the basic network topology of the 2011-12 Chilean massive student movement; ii) explore how the 180 key central nodes of the movement are connected, self-organize and spread information.…
Social bots can affect online communication among humans. We study this phenomenon by focusing on #YaMeCanse, the most active protest hashtag in the history of Twitter in Mexico. Accounts using the hashtag are classified using the BotOrNot bot detection tool. Our preliminary analysis suggests that bots played a critical role in disrupting online communication about the protest movement.
Social media has emerged to be a popular platform for people to express their viewpoints on political protests like the Arab Spring. Millions of people use social media to communicate and mobilize their viewpoints on protests. Hence, it is a valuable tool for organizing social movements. However, the mechanisms by which protest affects the population is not known, making it difficult to estimate the number of protestors. In this paper, we are inspired by sociological theories of protest participation and propose a framework to predict from the user's past status messages and interactions wheth…
We mapped the tweets of 520 US Congress members, focusing on analyzing their engagement with two broad topics: first, the COVID-19 pandemic, and second, the recent wave of anti-racist protest. We find that, in discussing COVID-19, Democrats frame the issue in terms of public health, while Republicans are more likely to focus on small businesses and the economy. When looking at the discourse around anti-Black violence, we find that Democrats are far more likely to name police brutality as a specific concern. In contrast, Republicans not only discuss the issue far less, but also keep their terms…
We collect and analyse messages exchanged in Twitter using two of the platform's publicly available APIs (the search and stream specifications). We assess the differences between the two samples, and compare the networks of communication reconstructed from them. The empirical context is given by political protests taking place in May 2012: we track online communication around these protests for the period of one month, and reconstruct the network of mentions and re-tweets according to the two samples. We find that the search API over-represents the more central users and does not offer an accu…
The viral video documenting the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin inspired nation-wide protests that brought national attention to widespread racial injustice and biased policing practices towards black communities in the United States. The use of social media by the Black Lives Matter movement was a primary route for activists to promote the cause and organize over 1,400 protests across the country. Recent research argues that moral discussions on social media are a catalyst for social change. This study sought to shed light on the moral dynamics shaping Blac…
There is little doubt about whether social networks play a role in modern protests. This agreement has triggered an entire research avenue, in which social structure and content analysis have been central --but are typically exploited separately. Here, we combine these two approaches to shed light on the opinion evolution dynamics in Egypt during the summer of 2013 along two axes (Islamist/Secularist, pro/anti-military intervention). We intend to find traces of opinion changes in Egypt's population, paralleling those in the international community --which oscillated from sympathetic to condemn…
In this study, we tried to see and characterize potential threats to digital activism in the internet-active nation of Indonesia by doing network analysis on a recent digital activism event on Twitter, which protested against a recent law related to alcoholic beverage investment. We hoped insights from the study can help the nation moving forward as public discourses are likely to stay online post-COVID. From this study, we found that threats in form of hashtag hijackings happen often in digital activism, and there were traces of a systematic information campaign in our observed case. We also …
In this paper, we are interested in understanding the interrelationships between mainstream and social media in forming public opinion during mass crises, specifically in regards to how events are framed in the mainstream news and on social networks and to how the language used in those frames may allow to infer political slant and partisanship. We study the lingual choices for political agenda setting in mainstream and social media by analyzing a dataset of more than 40M tweets and more than 4M news articles from the mass protests in Ukraine during 2013-2014 - known as "Euromaidan" - and the …
Public conversations on Twitter comprise many pertinent topics including disasters, protests, politics, propaganda, sports, climate change, epidemics/pandemic outbreaks, etc., that can have both regional and global aspects. Spatial discourse analysis rely on geographical data. However, today less than 1% of tweets are geotagged; in both cases--point location or bounding place information. A major issue with tweets is that Twitter users can be at location A and exchange conversations specific to location B, which we call the Location A/B problem. The problem is considered solved if location ent…
Social media have been widely used to organize citizen movements. In 2012, 75% university and college students in Quebec, Canada, participated in mass protests against an increase in tuition fees, mainly organized using social media. To reduce public disruption, the government introduced special legislation designed to impede protest organization. Here, we show that the legislation changed the behaviour of social media users but not the overall structure of their social network on Twitter. Thus, users were still able to spread information to efficiently organize demonstrations using their soci…
Event detection using social media streams needs a set of informative features with strong signals that need minimal preprocessing and are highly associated with events of interest. Identifying these informative features as keywords from Twitter is challenging, as people use informal language to express their thoughts and feelings. This informality includes acronyms, misspelled words, synonyms, transliteration and ambiguous terms. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to select the keywords frequently used in Twitter that are mostly associated with events of interest such as protests. …
Social media plays a crucial role in today's society. It results in paradigm changes in how people relate and communicate, convey and exchange ideas. Moreover, social media has evolved into critical knowledge networks for consumers and also affects decision-making. In elections, social media became an integral part of political campaigning to reach a greater audience and gather more support. The 2019 Lok Sabha election saw a massive spike in the usage of online social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp; with every major political party launching its own organized social me…
We examine the temporal evolution of digital communication activity relating to the American anti-capitalist movement Occupy Wall Street. Using a high-volume sample from the microblogging site Twitter, we investigate changes in Occupy participant engagement, interests, and social connectivity over a fifteen month period starting three months prior to the movement's first protest action. The results of this analysis indicate that, on Twitter, the Occupy movement tended to elicit participation from a set of highly interconnected users with pre-existing interests in domestic politics and foreign …
Climate Policy Elites' Twitter Interactions across Nine Countries
George Mason University（乔治梅森大学）；Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学）；Memorial University of Newfoundland（纽芬兰纪念大学）；Dublin City University（都柏林城市大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；University of Bern（伯尔尼大学）；The National Institute for Space Research (INPE)（巴西国家空间研究所）；Masaryk University（马萨里克大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur（坎普尔印度理工学院）；Edinburgh Napier University（爱丁堡纳皮尔大学）
The murder of George Floyd by police in May 2020 sparked international protests and renewed attention in the Black Lives Matter movement. Here, we characterize ways in which the online activity following George Floyd's death was unparalleled in its volume and intensity, including setting records for activity on Twitter, prompting the saddest day in the platform's history, and causing George Floyd's name to appear among the ten most frequently used phrases in a day, where he is the only individual to have ever received that level of attention who was not known to the public earlier that same we…
Temporal Analysis of Drifting Hashtags in Textual Data Streams: A Graph-Based Application
Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná (PUCPR)（巴拉那天主教大学）；Instituto Federal de Santa Catarina (IFSC)（圣卡塔琳娜联邦学院）；Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa (UEPG)（蓬塔格罗萨州立大学）
