The Dynamics of Protest Recruitment through an Online Network

By Sandra González-Bailón, Javier Borge-Holthoefer, Alejandro Rivero, Yamir Moreno. Scientific Reports, 2011

654 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The recent wave of mobilizations in the Arab world and across Western countries has generated much discussion on how digital media is connected to the diffusion of protests. We examine that connection using data from the surge of mobilizations that took place in Spain in May 2011. We study recruitment patterns in the Twitter network and find evidence of social influence and complex contagion. We identify the network position of early participants (i.e. the leaders of the recruitment process) and of the users who acted as seeds of message cascades (i.e. the spreaders of information). We find that early participants cannot be characterized by a typical topological position but spreaders tend to be more central in the network. These findings shed light on the connection between online networks, social contagion, and collective dynamics, and offer an empirical test to the recruitment mechanisms theorized in formal models of collective action.

Subfields: Communication, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aa6aef20deb418ed1889ce8e6a52826e974d2855

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Citations in the corpus

Assessing the bias in samples of large online networks (2014, methodology): “The data were collected as a follow up of previous work analysing the emergence of the movement in May 2011 (González-Bailón et al., 2013, 2011).”
How Social Media Is Changing Conflict (2017, background): “For instance, previous research has shown how the network effects of social media may induce political participation, from participation in the 2010 US midterm elections (Bond et al. 2012) to participation in the antiausterity movement (Indignados) in Spain (Gonźalez-Baiĺon et al. 2011).”
Collective action through common knowledge using a facebook model (2014, methodology): “A deterministic threshold model was used to explain a Spain 2011 protest event, based on Twitter data [8].”
Characterizing the 2016 Russian IRA influence campaign (2018, background): “Social media have helped foster democratic conversation about social and political issues: from the Arab Spring González-Bailón et al. (2011), to Occupy Wall Street movements Conover et al. (2013a,b) and other civil protests González-Bailón et al. (2013); Stella et al. (2018); Varol et al.…”
No . 2017 . 5 Computational Propaganda in the United States of America : Manufacturing Consensus Online (2017, background): “As members of the core, bots are in a position where they are capable of diffusing information that sets the agenda over Twitter (González-Bailón et al., 2011).”
Measuring user influence on Twitter: A survey (2015, background): “Only in Twitter, spread of inﬂuence has been used for diﬀerent purposes, such as political sciences [85], human mobility [47], transportation [79], rumor spreading [12], epidemiology [125], among many others.”
How Visibility and Divided Attention Constrain Social Contagion (2012, background): “Recent research suggests that social contagion is a complex process that depends on the type of information being transmitted [29], its novelty [27], influence of the initial spreader [38] and activity levels of subsequent spreaders [39], how people respond to repeated exposure to information by the”
Assessing the Bias in Communication Networks Sampled from Twitter (2012, methodology): “The data were collected as a follow up of previous work analysing the emergence of the movement in May 2011 (González-Bailón et al., 2012; González-Bailón et al., 2011).”
Analyzing the Digital Traces of Political Manipulation: The 2016 Russian Interference Twitter Campaign (2018, background): “Social media have helped foster democratic conversation about social and political issues: from the Arab Spring [31], to Occupy Wall Street movements [16, 17] and other civil protests [30, 55], Twitter and other social media platforms appeared to play an instrumental role in involving the public in…”
The Simple Rules of Social Contagion (2013, background): “In complex contagion, the probability to adopt a behavior, or an idea, varies with the extent of exposure, suggesting that social phenomena may drive respnse and interact non-trivially with network structure [7, 13, 26].”
Digital Footprints: Opportunities and Challenges for Online Social Research (2014, methodology): “For example, data from Twitter have been used to provide digital traces of the spread of protest information and public sentiment in the Arab Spring (González-Bailón et al. 2011).”
Vital nodes identification in complex networks (2016, background): “Besides, it can also help forensic investigators identify the most influential members of a criminal group [333], and monitor the exceptional events like mass mobilizations [334], etc.”
Images that Matter: Online Protests and the Mobilizing Role of Pictures (2018, methodology): “We also extracted from each original message user level characteristics that are known to have an impact on participation (Barberá et al. 2015; González-Bailón et al. 2011).”